Cana Bilir-Meier

Cana Bilir-Meier, *1986 Munich, lives in Vienna since 2009. Graduated in art education and currently enrolled in the classes for video/video installation and art/digital media, at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. In 2013 she realized the short film 'Semra Ertan', which was screened Internationally at festivals including Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, L'Alternativa Barcelona and Kassel DokFest. Her artistic and political explorations focus on the field of critical representations of migration, biographies, archives and politics of memory. In her filmic, artistic and text-based works, she consciously employs strategies of the fragmentary and incomplete to reveal constructions of biographies and histories.

Gani Bilir's personal archive of memories becomes the starting point of my research and artistic work of the fellowship year. Gani Bilir, born in 1920 in Mersin/Turkey, emigrated to Germany in the 1960s in the course of the so-called "guest worker era". I deconstruct fixed habits of seeing in relation to the representation of migration and archive by means of an associative, performative and poetic approach. The research process is the content of my representational form. How can an engagement with the never before published archive of Gani Bilir take place on an artistic and political level? What power issues do archives contain? How can visual formats be rewritten so as not to fall into an illustrative reproduction of reality? I would like to develop an artistic discussion that can reflect the research process in a fragmentary and discursive way. In doing so, I am searching for associative, performative and poetic forms of expression in order to question visual habits and practices.