Art Cologne 2025
Booth: Hall 11.2 | B-127
Dirimart is pleased to participate in Art Cologne 2025 with a curated selection of artists living and working in Germany. The presentation brings together diverse cultural perspectives that reflect the complex, often overlooked exchanges between Germany and Turkey. Moving beyond binaries of origin and destination, the exhibition centres on shared experience, explored through the distinct practices of Ayşe Erkmen, Anselm Reyle, Jorinde Voigt, Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, Nasan Tur, and Karin Kneffel.
Ayşe Erkmen’s subtle interventions soften the rigidity of modernist abstraction into something more intimate, as seen in Basic Shapes (2011). Anselm Reyle, meanwhile, uses found materials to explore the tension between mass production and artistic gesture. His ceramics, inspired by 1970s Fat Lava vases, embrace imperfection and kitsch, linking personal memory, national economies, and artistic form.
Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt examine identity, borders, and systems of classification, dismantling and reconfiguring the structure that shape them. In Herself / Himself (2021), body scans are transformed into ruler-like stencils that recall both the distancing effects of pandemic-era isolation and the historical surveillance of migrant bodies. The work prompts reflection on how shifting conditions reshape perception and self.
Jorinde Voigt’s practice is grounded in movement, rhythm, and transformation. Her recent oil paintings channel embodied, intuitive experience, while the sculptural series Dyade explores dualities—two gestures, two times, two selves—through mirrored forms in reflective metals. These works blur the boundaries between interior and exterior, inviting meditative engagement.
Through her layered photorealism, Karin Kneffel probes memory and temporality. Untitled (2020), from her Haymatlos (statelessness) series, reflects on the displacement of German exiles in Turkey during the 1930s. Depicting historically charged interiors, such as the home of architect Bruno Taut, she collapses time and place to reveal layered histories embedded in migration.
Nasan Tur’s Places of Resistance series engages with the symbolic weight of public spaces marked by protest and upheaval. By repeatedly crumpling and flattening photographs of sites like Tahrir, Taksim, and Tiananmen, Tur performs a gesture that evokes both erasure and remembrance. The resulting surfaces capture the fragility of memory and the endurance of resistance.
Together, these six artists present a nuanced reflection of material, body, space, and identity, framing Germany not only as a site of migration, but as a shared cultural terrain. Dirimart’s presentation at Art Cologne invites viewers to engage with the layered histories, affinities, and dialogues that continue to shape artistic production across both countries.
