Manifesta 16 Ruhr: Gülbin Ünlü

Manifesta 16 Ruhr, organized this year under the title This is not a church opened on June 21, focusing on the region’s multi-layered socio-cultural structure and deep-rooted heritage of migration. The fourth guest in our interview series with Turkish artists creating site-specific works for the biennial is Gülbin Ünlü

Interview: Selin Çiftci

Gülbin Ünlü. Photo: Ahmed DiCaprio

How did Manifesta 16’s curatorial concept, This is not a church, and the layered structure of the Ruhr region influence the selection or creation of your work? What would you like to say about the dialogue you established with the curators and the process your work underwent from its initial concept to its exhibition?

I am interested in how strongly spaces are already coded — and how little it takes to shift these codes. A church remains a church, even when it is negated. The work begins precisely within this field of tension. In dialogue with the curators, the question was less one of illustration than of precision: how far can I go without decorating or illustrating the space? The process became one of reduction — from possible narrative overlays toward a single, very direct gesture. The decision to work with the city pigeon emerged because it connects both levels: sacred charge, through the Holy Spirit, and urban reality.

The Ruhr region is one of the historical centers of the wave of migration from Turkey. What does Manifesta’s geographical selection and the region’s “guest worker” legacy signify for your artistic practice or the work you conceived for this exhibition?

The Ruhr region, as a site of post-migrant reality, is a structure that inscribes itself into the work. I am interested in asking which images, bodies, and forms of existence are read by a society as belonging or as disruptive. In this sense, the city pigeon becomes a radical condensation: a living being that exists in the midst of society, depends on it, and is simultaneously devalued. This ambivalence can be transferred to other forms of belonging without representing them one-to-one.

Gülbin Ünlü, Friend, 2026. Photo: Manifesta 16 Ruhr (Ivan Erofeev)

How do you establish the “silent knowledge” of the visual language you use in your work that functions without relying on the “subtext” of a specific geography? What does the initial connection a viewer, unfamiliar with the historical context, establishes through form and material alone tell you?

I often work through direct visual gestures. The pigeon is immediately legible; it does not require context. At the same time, it carries multiple layers of meaning. This field of tension is central to my work. Even without prior knowledge, the encounter comes first: a gaze that returns. Only afterwards do possible readings begin to unfold. This “silent knowledge” does not emerge through explanation, but through presence, material, and scale — as a form of resonance that is felt immediately, before it becomes conceptual.

How do you define locality not merely as a theme, but as a layer that permeates the fabric of your work? When translating a narrative specific to a particular region for the viewer, what elements do you deliberately leave “untranslated”?

For me, locality is a form of permeability rather than a fixed theme. Certain elements remain deliberately untranslated — for example, the reference to the güvercin, which in Turkish cultural contexts is strongly associated with longing and fragility. I do not fully translate these meanings; I allow them to remain as a space of resonance. The work functions without this knowledge, but it intensifies when it is brought into the encounter.

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Left: Gülbin Ünlü, Streetlife Live, 2025

Right: Gülbin Ünlü, Comfort Zone, 2025, Wood and metal, 200 × 40 × 50 cm

Manifesta holds a mirror to a crisis in Europe with each edition. Amid today’s post-industrial collapse, ecological concerns, migration and war policies, and blurring borders, what does your work suggest about the new forms of life of the future? How does your art establish a relationship of “repair” or “confrontation” with the current fragile state of the world?

I work on uncovering a condition that already exists. In my work Streetlife Live (2025, Villa Stuck, Munich), pigeons were physically present — not as an image, but as bodies in space — and in Comfort Zone, this logic materializes through forms of hostile architecture. The boundary between accepted and rejected forms of life is not a natural condition, but the result of regulation, architecture, and narrative. The city pigeon is a precise figure for this: a domesticated, abandoned companion animal, shaped by human breeding and for which we therefore bear responsibility. Instead of assuming that responsibility, it is displaced through exclusion and misinformation, while the animal itself is declared the problem. There is also a clear contradiction: the pigeon is regarded as a sign of the Holy Spirit and as a universal symbol of peace — yet at the same time it is systematically driven away, often even from churches themselves, instead of creating sites of care, such as supervised dovecotes. This rupture between symbol and practice is central. It reveals how far our values are removed from our actions. I am interested in this simultaneity of proximity and exclusion. The pigeon quite literally lives with us, but without protection, without rights, without recognition. In this constellation, it becomes a model for contemporary social conditions: life that is both integrated and displaced. In this sense, the work is also a call — to cities and to individuals — to inform themselves, to establish contact, and to assume responsibility in practical terms. The confrontation does not remain abstract: It can be translated into action.