Cana Bilir-Meier

Shot on Super 8, Cana Bilir-Meier's film portrays a group of migrant teenagers at the Olympia Shopping Center in Munich, where nine young people were killed in a racist attack in 2016. Beside their daily explorations, the teenagers restage scenes from the theater play Düşler Ülkesi (Land of Dreams). The premiere of the play in 1982 was overshadowed by a bomb threat. The contradiction in the film title of wanting to predict the past is a reference to the continuous experience of racism, but can also be read as a playful suggestion to break out of habitual patterns of thought and behavior—conveyed in the film through YouTube comments on Childish Gambino's song Redbone.

It showcases stories of migrants and their descendants in Germany: a monument for a Pakistani poet, the payslips of a Turkish Gastarbeiter, three sisters turning a decolonial gaze on Bavarian history.

Semra Ertan was born in Turkey, 1956 and moved to her parents to the federal republic of Germany in 1972. She worked as a construction draftswomen as well as an interpreter and wrote over 350 poems.1982 Semra Ertan burnt herself in Hamburg to give a sign against racism in Germany.

Cana Bilir-Meier builds on a 1970 competition in West Germany that sought an alternative to the term “Gastarbeiter” (“guest worker”). In Munich, a choir made up predominantly of former labor migrants of Turkish descent draws inspiration from the more than 30,000 submissions and develops its own musical interpretation. Together with the choir, the artist explores an approach to linguistic labels that is both encouraging and deconstructive—a reappropriation of words that at times appear overtly racist, often hurtful or derogatory, yet also absurd or emptied of meaning.