Manifesta purposely strives to keep its distance from what are often seen as the dominant centres of artistic production, instead seeking fresh and fertile terrain for the mapping of a new cultural topography.
Nejla Gür, TR
Başını Bağlamak, 1986. Acrylic, charcoal and pencil on primed paper 150 x 102 cm.
Nejla Gür came to Germany from Turkey in 1971 as a so-called guest worker and worked for eight years on the assembly line at Blaupunkt in Hildesheim before studying at the Braunschweig University of Fine Arts. At the centre of her painting and drawing work are the body and sign language of social attitudes and gestures, especially of women with history of migration. In a reduced line and a colourful, moving surface, she condenses personal experience, memory and the everyday life of the marginalised into images of poetic precision, formal density and social criticism – without exoticising attribution and sociological distance.