AMAN AMAN

What is it that we carry with us when we leave? 

What do we leave behind? 

What happens when we return?

People move, have moved, and will continue to do so. They leave for different reasons, under very different circumstances, and movement does not necessarily end with arrival. Some leave because they have to, others because they imagine that somewhere else might offer a different life. Some leave and never return, others return repeatedly, sometimes to find themselves estranged from the place they once knew as home. The place has changed, but so have they. What was once familiar can become something that has to be approached again, from a distance. And perhaps this is one of the first ruptures that migration produces: from the moment one begins to move, one’s relationship to place is no longer quite singular. A place can become something remembered, imagined, visited, left again; it can exist simultaneously as here and there, as present and absent. 

The stories of why people leave are as many as the people who move: genocide, war, political persecution, systemic breakdown, injustice, poverty, the search for work, the desire for a better life, for an elsewhere. There are also those who cross borders with relative ease, who can return, visit, maintain several homes or decide where they might live next. Migration is such a vast word in its implications that it can almost conceal as much as it reveals. It describes movements that are forced and movements that are chosen, movements that are temporary and those that become permanent, people who remain connected to several places and those who are made to lose access to the place from which they came. Migration can therefore only be understood in relation to the larger political and economic forces that shape who moves and why, but also who is permitted to move, to return and to belong. 

AMAN AMAN is an exhibition and three-month public programme that explores the deeply felt longing, the bittersweet in-between, and the cultures that are born from unstable identities. It centres on the long histories of movement of peoples between Anatolia, Greece, and Germany, but extends further beyond, reaching the shores of the Americas, embracing stories from multiple ethnic and religious communities from the broader region and beyond (underground and from the margins). Looking across the histories of these geographies, we encounter the polyglot populations of the late Ottoman world and the violent reorganisation that followed its dissolution; the drawing of new national borders and the displacement and exchange of populations; the wars and political upheavals of the twentieth century; the recruitment of workers from Greece and Türkiye to Germany in the post-war period; and the continued movements produced by economic inequality and political instability. These histories are not the same, but they have each altered the relationship between people and place, between where one comes from and where one is allowed to make a life. These histories are also not over. They continue to shape the places we inhabit, the languages we speak, the food we share, the relationships we inherit and the ways we understand belonging. To look back at them is not to return to a past that can be restored, but to recognise what has remained unresolved, what has been transformed, and what might allow us to move differently into the future.

Perhaps what changes through migration is not only where we live, but the very idea of where we belong. Once movement begins, the place left behind can no longer remain entirely as it was, and neither can the person who left. Return is not necessarily a reversal of departure. One can return to a homeland and still feel displaced within it, or discover that which had been remembered as home now exists only partially in the place itself. John Berger understands home as more than a place of residence: it is the centre from which the world is understood and given meaning. To leave it, then, is also to unsettle the centre from which one’s world has been organised. As he writes, “to emigrate is always to dismantle the centre of the world, and so to move into a lost, disoriented one of fragments.”[1] But what happens after this dismantling? If migration can unsettle the centre from which the world was once understood, can another centre emerge from the fragments?

Yet the lives of migrant workers also tell us something about what can emerge from being elsewhere. “I didn’t want to go back. I knew I’d rather leave the fruits of my labour here than my hope”[2] wrote Filiz Taskin, one of the Gastarbeiter workers resident at the Telefunken dormitory between 1963 and 1969, where 193 female workers from Greece, Yugoslavia and Türkiye were housed in Kreuzberg as part of the recruitment agreement between the Federal Republic of Germany and these countries made in the 1960s. The dormitories, where cross-ethnic friendships were forged between factory workers, were also sites of civic and political activism and female autonomy. They provided a space for women workers who hesitated to return to their home countries, where their lives might have been restricted by more patriarchal familial norms and potentially more volatile political conditions. Letters instead were written home, from a safe distance. Here, the distance from home was not only a condition of separation. It also created the possibility for other relationships, other forms of independence to take place. 

Perhaps one has to leave to find affinities that could not be seen from home. The diasporas that formed across the post-Ottoman world and beyond brought people from different communities into proximity, sometimes creating relationships that might not have been possible in the places they had left behind. In this sense, AMAN AMAN bridges two contemporary neighbourhoods with shared migrant histories. It connects Tavros with Nikaia, parts of Athens where refugees from Asia Minor settled in 1922, and which have also continued to provide solidarity to more recent arrivals. In Nikaia, the satellite exhibition will be housed in one of the remaining refugee houses still standing. Other houses are inhabited by descendants of the families who first settled there, while others are occupied by more recent incomers; still more are deemed by the polity to be insignificant historical residues, unworthy of conservation and left to ruin. AMAN AMAN purposefully brings our attention to these architectural witnesses and their significance as forms of archival remembrance. Similarly, by collaborating with the Armenian communities of Athens, the exhibition underlines the long-term commitment to salvaging and nurturing more hybrid identities as well as the creative potential of polyglossia – each language after all carries its own stories. By connecting these two neighbourhoods and the communities that constitute them, and the histories they bring with them, AMAN AMAN aspires to offer a re-reading of history from the margins, from languages less heard, from peoples less visible. It insists that these stories are still unsettled, rife with contradictions and multiplicities. It narrates histories both individual and collective, from the voices of the displaced, the placeless, the diasporic, the defeated, of those that had the courage to start again. 

At the same time, it also looks at the act of encounter as essential to how we define ourselves. It echoes Derrida’s claim that, “hospitality is culture itself”[3] and insists that identity and by extension culture are formed through alterity, in relation with others. Or, to paraphrase Levinas, hospitality precedes personal ethics and abidance to civic laws; it is a fundamental condition of being human. Strangers, he argues, must be welcomed, without ulterior motives related to identity or utility, and it is precisely this brave act of welcoming, of bringing into the fold, of empathy beyond tolerance that must be upheld. Every time someone leaves, they arrive somewhere, and every time someone arrives it is from elsewhere, and each story told or sung of these arrivals and departures, is as universal as it is particular, speaking of troubled homes, unstable places, and the in-between. 

And so AMAN AMAN takes its name from song, from a vocal gesture and phrase heard across Greek and Turkish musical traditions that crosses linguistic boundaries, carrying a feeling that is understood without necessarily being translated. It ululates, like a drawn-out lament, a sigh, or a call that insists: we are here, with our distress, longing and joy.

Cevdet Erek’s commission, Hayat (2026), meaning “heart” in Arabic and Turkish, echoes the architecture of houses in Northern Greece, present-day Turkey and the Balkans. The work invites the visitor into a space hovering between private and public: a structure that evokes the familiarity of a home, but without the personal traces that would define its identity, leaving room for each person’s memory and imagination. Hayat spatially dissolves, reflecting the process of remembrance of place as something unstable and fugitive. In parallel, it implies home as exceeding spatial limitations, rather as something felt within that can be carried, reconstructed and inhabited anew through memory and human relationships. 

In A Curse that Turns Gold into Ladybugs (2025), Vartan Avakian examines the myth of “Armenian gold” in Türkiye and the enduring fascination it generates through treasure hunting, conspiracy theories and the stories surrounding it. In the work, cryptic maps, spells and amulets point to an alleged buried wealth, but also to landscapes and lives lost through displacement. Treasure maps, at the centre of Avakian’s research, become documents of a desire connected to the denial of historical loss. More than a century after the Armenian Genocide, the myth of Armenian gold continues to resurface through stories, online forums and fantasies surrounding a wealth believed to be hidden, revealing how the legacy of dispossession remains present in the Turkish national imagination.

Didem Pekün’s new essay-film, Promised You a Miracle (2026), follows an endless journey across land, sea and air, towards a miracle that never arrives. Storms, whales, volcanoes and landscapes coexist with humans and animals encountered and left behind along the way. Drawing on the thoughts of Hannah Arendt and Timothy Morton, as well as the Book of Miracles, the film connects migration with the expectation of a miracle and the desire for a future more liveable than the present. Through split screens and a restless journey, the film creates a montage that connects human and non-human beings, all waiting for a way out of a world that seems to have reached an impasse.

In Ypsilon (2026), Valinia Svoronou creates a black-and-white moving image work in three parts, moving between Athens and Schoinoudi in Imbros. The title refers to the letter Y, which retains traces of older sounds in modern Greek writing and, in the Pythagorean tradition, is associated with a crossroads and a moment of choice. The first part begins with the artist’s experience of drawing the nude model during her years at the Athens School of Fine Arts, connecting this repeated practice and her journey to the school through Omonia with the history of art education in Greece and the European models that shaped it. The second moves to Schoinoudi and a family story of movement and return, where ruins, an old çevre (traditional embroidered cloth), family accounts and everyday objects meet a landscape that exists both in the present and in memory. In the third, these elements are transformed and reappear through erasures and shifts in the image. Through transformations, erasures and the reappearance of the drawing, Ypsilon returns towards the moment before the paths divide, holding its subjects in a suspended state between movement and return, memory and the present, and considering how what has changed or been lost continues to leave traces in the present.

Vassos Kapantais’s (1924-1990) sculptural work Ικέτις (1964) (in English: “beggar”) takes the form of a human figure in a prostrate kneeling gesture. It evokes prayer, a plea or a request for mercy, but also a moment of pause and rest, a curling up as a sense of protection from the world outside. The figure, so small you could hold it in the palm of your hand, suggests vulnerability and endurance, the need to ask for assistance and the need simply to stand still for a while. Kapantais, an artist and poet, was born in Mytilene to a refugee family who had just been expelled from Pergamo (Asia Minor). His artistic practice often returned to this sense of loss and erasure. He was commissioned to produce numerous public sculptures which can still be seen in Nea Smyrni, an area of Athens he was deeply affiliated with, which could almost be seen as an open sculpture park dedicated to his oeuvre.

A Tatavla Gothic (2026) is a novella by Marina Papazyan that sets literary ambition against the conditions of late Ottoman modernity and its afterlives. As the novella’s narrator moves between Greek and Armenian and across the social worlds of her working-class neighbourhood of Tatavla and the mansions of Istanbul’s intellectual class, the Empire reverberates through the city’s salons, discussions between bourgeois socialists, the mundanity of state violence, and the shame of surviving it. Initially only an object of the article she is writing on Byron, the book’s titular genre begins intruding on the narrative in the form of nightmares, ghosts and vampire stories, wherein the horror of orientalist extraction, queer repression, and a city closing in on itself reveal themselves to be just as gothic. This work is the second publication by TAVROS Press.  

The Café Amans of New York offer one example of this encounter. In Hâlimiz Duman (We Are Doomed) (2026), Larissa Araz presents a vinyl record exploring the musical heritage of migrant communities from the Ottoman Empire in New York in the early 20th century. The record includes historical recordings by Achilleas Poulos and Marika Papagika, through which the way a multiethnic diaspora formed a shared language through music comes into view. The recordings become a means of preserving memory and continuity after displacement. Araz’s second work for the exhibition, Marika’s Bar (2026), is a neon light installation recreating a fictional logo for the first Café Aman in New York, opened by Marika Papagika on 34th Street. Araz constructed the sign through research into the logos of other Café Amans and archival images of 34th Street from the 1940s, creating an imagined visual trace of a venue for which no original logo survives. The venue brought together Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Albanians, Arabs and Sephardic Jews and, during Prohibition, operated as an illicit café. The fictional sign becomes a way of bringing this place back into view, keeping a space of gathering and music that was once part of the city’s diasporic life from disappearing from history.

Zafos Xagoraris’ Two Camps (2026) is a sculptural and sonic installation that references the Görlitz and Wünsdorf camps that served as detention camps for Greek and Muslim prisoners of war, respectively, during World War I in Germany. The two camps shared many similarities, as, for political reasons, the prisoners lived in an ambiguous situation somewhere between hospitality and confinement; they published newspapers in their own languages, and audio recordings were made, while the first mosque built in Germany was in Wünsdorf. Xagoraris has recreated a sign from the Wünsdorf camp which includes edited audio recordings of detainees from Greece, Senegal, Madagascar, Algeria, Tunisia, India, Nepal, and elsewhere. It stands in the Solidarity School of Tavros, a self-run collective school that offers language classes for migrant and low-income Greek families, as a form of local exchange economy. Standing in the courtyard of the semi-ruined buildings, the sculpture and its sonic recordings, visible from the street, make for a spectral and dissonant apparition from the past with contemporary resonances.   

Industries of Denial (2025–2026) by Angela Melitopoulos and Kerstin Schroedinger is an ongoing audiovisual research project around the Berlin–Baghdad Railway and the politics of historical denial connected to it. The work examines how the infrastructure, economic expansion and colonial policies of the German Empire were connected to violence and the displacement of minorities in the late Ottoman Empire, as well as to the persistent erasure of these histories. Through mapping, archival photographs transferred onto 16mm film and essayistic recordings along the railway line, the work connects the history of genocidal violence with routes of migration and the ways in which this history is presented and silenced today. At the Nikaia Cultural Centre, three stages of the project are presented: Industries of Denial, Stage 10: From Musa Dagh to Port Said, presented in 2026 as part of the Berlinale Forum Expanded exhibition, and Stage 9: Samandağ – Antakya. The Zero Surface of History and Stage 8: Through the Amanos Mountains. Bridge, Tunnel, Overpass, presented for the first time in Nikaia. The works revisit the history of the Armenian presence in the region and its relationship to the railway routes, bringing attention to what survives through the landscape, the accounts of local residents and official histories. Industries of Denial’s three chapters will be housed at the Nikaia Cultural Centre (in Greek: “Pneumatiki Estia Nikaias”), located in an area whose refugee history is surviving waves of ongoing erasure.

PUBLIC PROGRAMME

Friday, 9 October 2026

16:00 – 19:00 | Exhibition opening & presentation of work
Industries of Denial, Stage 10: From Musa Dagh to Port Said
Artists: Angela Melitopoulos & Kerstin Schroedinger
Location: Nikaia Cultural Centre, Karakoulouxi D. 45, Nikaia 18450

20:00 – 20:30 | Lecture-performance
Waswas
Artist: Vartan Avakian
Location: Armenian Evangelical Church of Greece, 30 Lamias Street, Piraeus 18542

Waswas delves into the persistent myth of buried Armenian gold and its place in Turkey’s popular imagination. Drawing on hundreds of hours of online material from treasure-hunting forums, the lecture traces a world of cryptic maps, spells, rumors, and conspiracy theories. These spaces blend folklore and commerce, offering instructions for locating treasure, decoding symbols, and breaking the spells believed to protect buried riches, revealing how the legacy of Armenian dispossession continues to haunt the landscape.

21:00 – 22:30 | Film screening
Menq
Artavazd Peleshian, Armenia, 1969, 30 min
No dialogue

A tribute to the Armenian people, Menq (in English: We) is a portrait of exile, reunion, collective fervour, destruction and reconstruction, that captures the tumults of Armenia’s history, the Armenian genocide in particular.

Geographies
Chaghig Arzoumanian, Lebanon, 2015, 72 min
Original language with English & Greek subtitles
Location: Armenian Evangelical Church of Greece, 30 Lamias Street, Piraeus 18542

Nazareth was twelve years old, Lousaper still a newborn, when the Armenian genocide was perpetrated in 1915. The film traces the paths of their solitary peregrination throughout exile; from their village of Burunkişla to Beirut, passing through Cairo, Karantina and an orphanage in Saida’s before meeting again, years later, around a lunch table where they fell in love and decided to start a family.

In collaboration with the Armenian Evangelical Church of Greece and Azatamart – Armenian Cultural Association.

Thursday, 22 October 2026, 19:00 | Reading

Ypsilon
Artist: Valinia Svoronou
Location: TAVROS, 1st floor, Anaxagora 33, 17778 Tavros

Thursday, 5 November 2026, 19:00 | Lecture-performance

A-n-other Archive: Decentralised Simultaneities around 1964
Artists: Anna Bromley & Meltem Ahiska
Location: TAVROS, 1st floor, Anaxagora 33, 17778 Tavros

A lecture-performance based on correspondence between the two contributors, around different histories of migration and movement between East Germany, Turkey, Cyprus, Syria and Lebanon.

Wednesday, 11 November 2026, 19:00 | Lecture-performance with sound excerpts

Two Camps
Artist: Zafos Xagoraris
Location: TAVROS, 1st floor, Anaxagora 33, 17778 Tavros

Saturday, 14 November 2026

16:00 – 18:30 | Walk & discussion
Common Spaces, Common Stories
Contributors: Eleni Katrini & Kyriaki Papathanasopoulou

Nikaia is a city shaped by the movement of people. Along with them came languages, customs, professions, objects and memories, which found a place in homes and neighbourhoods, but also in between them: in the passages, squares and shared public spaces of the city. Eleni Katrini and Kyriaki Papathanassopoulou invite us on a walk through these in-between, shared places of Nikaia. Drawing on their previous research in the area, they talk as they walk, following the stories of people who lived in different periods and arrived here through diverse journeys. Through their stories, moments and experiences of migration meet in the space of the present-day city. What stories can a city hold? How do people arriving from different places share the same space? When does an unfamiliar place begin to feel familiar? As we walk, public space becomes a meeting point between different times, voices and ways of inhabiting the city. The walk ends at the Nikaia Cultural Centre. There, around a table with photographs, texts, objects and other traces, the conversation opens up to the public. The stories encountered along the way become intertwined with the memories and experiences of the participants, forming a temporary, shared narrative of the city.

Starting point: To be announced soon

19:00 | Exhibition opening & Presentation of work
Industries of Denial, Stage 9: Samandağ – Antakya. Zero Surface of History
Artists: Angela Melitopoulos & Kerstin Schroedinger
Location: Nikaia Cultural Centre, Karakoulouxi D. 45, Nikaia 18450

Thursday, 19 November 2026, 20:00 | Concert

Artist: Martha Mavroidi
Location: TAVROS, 1st floor, Anaxagora 33, 17778 Tavros

3–7 December 2026 | Film screening series

Location: Greek Film Archive, 136 Meg. Alexandrou, Athens 10435

A series of films on migration, bringing historical films into dialogue with contemporary works, and archival documents with contemporary artistic practices.

This film series is part of the Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival (AAGFF) Special Edition: AMAN AMAN.

More information about the screenings will be announced in the coming weeks.

Saturday, 12 December 2026, 17:00 | Exhibition opening & Presentation of work

Industries of Denial, Stage 8: Through the Amanos Mountains. Bridge, Tunnel, Overpass
Artists: Angela Melitopoulos & Kerstin Schroedinger
Location: Nikaia Cultural Centre, Karakoulouxi D. 45, Nikaia 18450

Thursday, 14 January 2027, 19:00 | Lecture-performance

Artist: Hera Büyüktaşçıyan
Location: TAVROS, 1st floor, Anaxagora 33, 17778 Tavros

Thursday, 21 January 2027

19:00 | Discussion
Contributors: Natasa Lemos, Dimitris Prokos, Maik Tsilingirian, İSTASYON editions
Location: TAVROS, 1st floor, Anaxagora 33, 17778 Tavros

A discussion around multilingualism, literature and publishing initiatives through historical and contemporary examples.

20:00 | Performance
Μeans of Transport
Artist: Dimitris Prokos

Μeans of Transport is a live performance project for clarinet, electronics, and pre-recorded archival material. Drawing on popular song cultures circulating between Greece, Türkiye‎‎, and Germany (“dimotiko” and “laiko”, Anadolu rock, krautrock), as well as transnational exchanges and population movements between these countries, the work explores migration and multilingualism as sonic and cultural conditions. Selected vocal as well as instrumental samples in different languages, dialects, and hybrid idioms are treated as unstable materials, fragmented, re-contextualized, and re-articulated through live improvisation and electronic processing. The history and aesthetics of the clarinet inform this process, since the instrument was created around the center of Europe and gradually earned itself an important place in various local musical idioms. The work seeks to deal with transportation in space and memory, all while focusing on pauses, hesitations, and mistakes as creative elements.

Thursday, 28 January 2027, 14:00–23:00 | Finissage

More information about this event will be announced in the coming weeks.

[1] John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (New York: New York Review Books, 2026), 60-61.

[2] “Stresemannstrasse 30 – An Inventory,” in ЯE:IMAGINE: THE RED HOUSE (Inventories / Interventions / Inventions) (Berlin: Maxim Gorki Theater, 2025), 23.

[3] Nikos Papastergiadis, The Cosmos in Cosmopolitanism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023), 130.