NASAN TUR AT THE EUROPEAN MONTH OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN BERLIN

Nasan Tur’s installation Bautzner Strasse 112A (2009) is included in the 6th Europäischer Monat der Fotografie Berlin (European Month of Photography).

Bautzner Strasse 112A, which is part of the festival’s main exhibition, MemoryLab: The Sentimental Turn, explores notions of power, repression and uprising. The work is comprised of fifteen photographs, each of which depicts a seemingly identical door. These were taken by Tur from the inside of the prison cells at Bautzner Strasse, the infamous DDR-era jail in Dresden, and are hung within a space that replicates exactly the dimensions of the cells. Accordingly, the installation induces feelings of claustrophobia, entrapment and repression, commenting not just on the social injustices of the Stasi secret police, who detained and interrogated over 12,000 political dissidents at Bautzner Strasse, but prisons everywhere.                                

The European Month of Photography Berlin, which began in 2004 and takes place every two years, presents a wide range of exhibitions and events on historic and contemporary photography. The festival, the largest in Germany, is organized by Kulturprojekte Berlin GmbH in collaboration with museums, cultural institutions, galleries, embassies, project spaces, and photography schools in Berlin and Potsdam.