Manifesta 16 Ruhr: Özlem Altın

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 third guest in our interview series with Turkish artists creating site-specific works for the biennial is Özlem Altın

Interview: Selin Çiftci

Özlem Altın. Photo: Julian Stallabrass

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?

My work for Manifesta 16 is developed in relation to its curatorial framework and the Ruhr region, where histories of labour, migration, and post-industrial transformation are interwoven.Starting from the legacy of my father as a Gastarbeiter/guest worker, my installation reflects on and questions how labour shapes identity and social belonging, and how visibility and recognition is assigned. The curatorial premise of rethinking spaces opens up questions of what we collectively choose to honour and how memory is socially constructed. My work, titled You Are What You Hold, explores how labour is inscribed into the body through repetitive gestures that become somatic traces. Rooted in the acts of repairing and knotting elastic threads performed by my father during factory work, the piece reflects on how labour is internalised as an embodied memory. 

In dialogue with curator/mediator Gürsoy Doğtaş, I developed this new commission for the exterior of the church, situated in relation to histories of labour and migration that have often remained marginal within representation. The work evolved from an initial biographical reflection into a spatial intervention. 

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 carries the legacy of the Gastarbeiter programs. It is shaped by industrial production and by workers once invited as temporary labour, whose presence has been fundamental to the formation of the region. Their biographies point to shared precarious conditions shaped by these very systems of labour and migration. The tension between being defined as “guest” and the reality of long-term presence raises questions of belonging. This unresolved belonging persists in the body through mechanical rhythms. The installation consists of enlarged photographs of my father’s hands repairing elastic threads. What is visible is a rhythmic repetition of maintenance and care. Hands continue movements even when the objects of labour are no longer present, and what remains are empty gestures that still speak of work. I often observe in my father a quiet, nervous stimming in everyday situations, as if a somatic echo of his working life persists in the body.

Özlem Altın, You Are What You Hold, 2026. Photo: Manifesta 16 Ruhr (Rainer Schlautmann)

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?

In the installation, gestures of knotting and binding construct a structure of relation, where repair becomes an attempt to hold together what remains fragmented. The movements depicted resemble loops of thought that keep running in the mind without resolution. By enlarging the hands to a monumental scale, the gesture shifts from documentation to presence. 

The plants growing along the threads and lines form a vertical root system, a network of connection and transmission. The plants anchor the floating hands, proposing an organic grounding that slows perception and claims space. What emerges is a reading of care and tension. The work reflects on labour that remains essential yet unrecognised, and on how it continues to inhabit the body long after work has ended. Repair appears as an ongoing practice of holding and connecting what is there, but has been fragmented. The installation concentrates this process, creating a field in which attention slows and relations between material and time can unfold. On the wall, the stretched threads resemble the strings of an instrument, as if the hands are playing a muted score. Soundless, yet resonant.