#Moving between Self and Place

5 artists and students of the Berlin University of the Arts, with their different cultural and geographical backgrounds, come together in one room to deal with the topic of "self" and "place" in various forms and to open a discourse about subjective perspectives, individual starting points and angles of view on precisely this "self".

"Where do you come from? A simple question rarely brings a simple answer. What lies under the answer to such a question might be the complexity of the relationship between an individual and their environment. A relationship that reveals the loss of a sense of belonging in a world where the ‘in-between’ becomes a norm."

Auriane Jaillet, born in 1997, lives in the Parisian suburbs. In her artistic practice, she is especially interested in the way words and images can meet, struggle and complement each other. If fiction is at the core of her practice, that is because fiction stimulates the imagination, broadens the perspectives, and highlights how much reality can be absurd, abject, and wonderful at the same time.

The central element of the work of Léni Chons is language and the impossibility of transferring meaning through it.
Other topics dealt with include identity as a social construct, the attempt to locate oneself in
space, the questioning of social norms and the striving to remove taboos, interpersonal relationships and misunderstandings, as well as art itself and an examination of its possibilities and limits.

Pegah Keshmirshekan was born in 1996 in Iran and is currently working and living in Berlin. The key aspect of her artistic practice is how collective identities and cultural backgrounds would contribute to/ affect the formation of one’s personal identity in the globalized world. Her main practice is focused on revisiting identity question – both personal and collective – through documentation of events mainly by her videos, sound works, paintings and installations.

Sugano Matsusaki was born in 1992 in Okinawa, Japan and currently lives and works in Berlin. Based on anonymous biographies, she creates a mosaic of individual experiences with a focus on language, identity, migration and work. In her films, performances and installations, she combines these fragments into stories that the viewer can remember from her own experience like a déjà-vu. In this way, the unfamiliar and strange appears in a familiar horizon.

Umut Azad Akkel was born in 1991 in İzmir, Turkey. He works and lives in Berlin. He is practising visual art, product design and curating cultural seminars. He is one of the co-founders of I.D.A. Initiative (Intercultural/Diversity/Antidiscrimination) at Universität der Künste Berlin.