Curator about art from Berlin-Kreuzberg: “How fearlessly this art addresses the issues”

taz: Gürsoy Doğtaş, why was Kreuzberg such a special place between the 1960s and 1980s - both for migrant workers, dissidents and for left-wing and alternative movements? What forms of art emerged there?

Gürsoy Doğtaş: The best way to tell this is through an individual. Eduardo Paolozzi, son of Italian immigrants from Edinburgh and co-founder of British Pop Art, lived in 1974/75 as a guest of the DAAD in a residential studio on Kottbusser Damm, where Kreuzberg merges into Neukölln. He recognized his own origins in the families that had just arrived there. He listened to the recordings in the Phonogram archive that the musicologists Kurt and Ursula Reinhard had made in southern Turkey since 1955 and placed lines from these lamentations over his screen prints, next to images of West German industrial modernism. This is how the series “Kottbusser Damm Pictures and Turkish Music” was created. It was no coincidence that he ended up on Kottbusser Damm, of all places. After the Wall was built, Kreuzberg was pushed to the edge of West Berlin: vacancies, redevelopment areas, low rents, and lack of interest from city politicians. The recruits, exiles from Greece, Iran and Turkey, students, conscientious objectors and artists came here. They lived in the same streets without forming a movement. The art that emerged from it is correspondingly diverse. Next to Paolozzi's Pop Art is the Berlin Critical Realism of Monika Sieveking, next to the environments of Vlassis Caniaris, who builds his figures out of worn clothes and suitcases, the painting of Hanefi Yeter, which brings together socially critical painting and Ottoman miniature.

taz: In your exhibition about Kreuzberg you consciously decided not to tell the story of this time and place with contemporary documents, but rather through visual art, as part of art history. Why?

Doğtaş: The art production itself made the decision for us. In the 1970s and 1980s there was so much work and so much work in Kreuzberg. Patrizia Dander (deputy curatorial director of Gropius Bau, editor's note) and I take up the socio-historical topics that other migration exhibitions also deal with: recruitment, housing, right of residence, racism. But we start from the works and ask further from there, about styles, critical realism, photomontage, pop art, miniatures, and about curatorial comparisons that make these differences tangible in space. We ask how the networks were organized, who shared the studio with whom, who took a picture together and which motifs - the stamp, the suitcase, the children on the street - artists found independently of one another. Contemporary history is contained in all of this, it is the material of these works. But the questions we ask them are those of art history. Many of these artists are hanging out here for the first time. We want to inscribe them in an art history that has so far been told without them.

taz: Why has this politicized, realistic form of migrant art been so forgotten since the fall of the Berlin Wall?

is an art historian, journalist, curator and works at the intersections of institutional criticism, structural racism and queer studies.

He did his doctorate at the LMU Munich on Chantal Mouffe's theory of democracy in the exhibition discourse of the biennials. Among other things, he curated “here is no there there” at the Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt (2024), “Annem işçi – Who sews the red flags?” at the Museum Marta Herford (2024), and he was creative mediator at Manifesta 16 Ruhr (2026).

Doğtaş: Forgetting has several layers, and the exhibition tries to keep them apart. Some of this work was purchased or donated in the 1970s and 1980s. The Berlinische Galerie, the collection of the Kreuzberg Art Office, the City Museum – all three are our lenders. But these works have hardly been hung since 1989. That is currently changing: The Berlin Museum, our cooperation partner, is working on its own collection with regard to the history of migration and is showing it in parallel in the exhibition “Divided Life”. Collecting and showing are two different things. And museum memory only arises through the second. Critical realism, the representational, socially critical painting of West Berlin, lost its popularity in the 1980s. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city asked itself new questions: capital, turning point, east – and migration was not one of them. The artists themselves set off; Mehmet Aksoy and Metin Talayman returned to Istanbul. And the postmigrant discourses that brought migration back into the museum from the 2000s asked about the present and participation, not about the art of recruitment. So this production fell between eras.

taz: You have already held a number of exhibitions on this topic, including “here is no there there” in 2024 at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt in Main or at the current Manifesta in the Ruhr area, where you dedicated yourself to the art of migrant workers in Germany. Now the exhibition in the Gropius Bau. Why is this forgotten part of art history now receiving such resonance?

Doğtaş: I think the resonance begins with the works themselves. Cecilia Boisier painted a woman who fell asleep with a letter in her hand, and this image still resonates today, even though hardly anyone writes letters anymore: the wait for a message from far away, longed for and feared at the same time. Such works need no explanation to be effective. What you discover when you take a closer look is the attitude behind it. At that time, these artists developed methods to reflect on their own position and sought ways to speak to the migrant workers and exiles rather than about them. Added to this is how fearlessly this art addresses the issues that affected migrant workers and exiles, including racism in the Federal Republic of Germany.

taz: We have already spoken about postmodernism's aversion in the 1980s to political, non-ironic forms of realism, which were dismissed as social kitsch. Was this critical attitude just arrogant?

Doğtaş: I don't want to say arrogant. It's a good thing that there were blue-blooded, queer-white dandy punks like you at the end of the 70s who finely differentiated which art corresponded to their own preferences. The exhibition does not argue at all against those who distanced themselves from critical realism at the time. It shows how many styles were possible side by side in Kreuzberg. This diversity makes the time – and the place – so interesting. And it makes something else possible. For me, these works were a medium through which I could talk to my mother about her years as a guest worker. Monika Sieveking's group picture with Siemens workers touched her very much, and when I showed it for the first time, she started talking to the artist in the exhibition. These are the moments I mean when I say that this exhibition is also made for the migrants whose story it tells. For many of them, the museum is still not a place to be taken for granted, even though they have supported it with their tax money for over fifty years. In Kreuzberg, as early as 1975, there were surprisingly extensive models for taking them seriously as an audience.

taz: There are strong anti-Islamic tendencies in the right-wing conservative environment of the art world, for example in the CDU or the Springer Press, and since documenta 15 there has been a real hatred of activist, left-wing art. The argument: This isn’t art at all, at least not by the standards of the “Western” art world.

Doğtaş: When I was researching, I was amazed at how familiar the tone is. What Bild wrote about “Flood of Foreigners” in the 1980s and what Heinrich Lummer made of it as CDU Interior Senator is the environment in which these works were created. The question back then was less whether it was art, but rather where it could be shown: in the art office rather than in the galleries, hardly in the collections. That is one continuity. I see the other in people with a migration background who now vote for the CDU or AfD and whose view of the world comes from media that their parents or grandparents described as a flood back then. I would like to say to them: Please look at who humiliated your ancestors back then and ask yourself what you expect from the same people today. The works in the exhibition tell you.

“Kreuzberg: Art and Migration since 1960”. Gropius Bau Berlin, until January 27, 2027. Parallel to this: “Shared Life. Art and Migration in Berlin”. Berlin Museum, until February 7, 2027