AMAN AMAN

AMAN AMAN brings to the foreground stories that often remain unseen within dominant narratives. Through new commissions by TAVROS, created especially for the exhibition, the participating artists approach microhistories of people and communities, as well as the cultural exchanges that emerge through movement, from the Aegean and Anatolia to the cities of Germany and their diasporas.

Migration is not only a movement from one place to another, but also a process through which new relationships and forms of connection emerge and continue to link people and places across borders. Stories, sounds, and images move, intersect, and reappear across different places and times. From the haunting tunes of amanades and türküs to the solidarities that developed between Greek and Turkish workers in Germany, and from the post-Ottoman Café Amans of New York to contemporary artistic voices from the Aegean coast and Anatolia, the exhibition moves between past and present. Following these routes, AMAN AMAN explores how migration shapes not only people’s lives, but also the relationships, memories, and cultural forms that travel with them.

The works in the exhibition explore these histories from different perspectives:

Vassos Kapantais’s sculptural work takes the form of a human figure in a kneeling gesture. It may evoke prayer, a plea or a request for mercy, but also a moment of pause and rest. Without imposing a specific interpretation, the figure remains between vulnerability and endurance, between the need to ask and the need simply to stand still for a while.

In Ypsilon (2026), Valinia Svoronou creates a black-and-white moving image work through pencil drawings, shifting the narrative between Athens and Schoinoudi in Imbros. The title refers to the letter Y and its symbolic association with a crossroads and a moment of choice. The first part begins with the experience of drawing the nude model at the Athens School of Fine Arts and the journey to the school through Omonia, connecting personal experience with the history of art education in Greece. In the second part, the narrative moves to Schoinoudi and a family story of movement and return. Drawings of the village, ruins, an old çevre, family accounts and everyday objects come together in a landscape where the present meets memory. Through erasures, transformations and the reappearance of the drawing, Ypsilon returns to the moment before the branching point, considering how what has been lost or changed continues to appear in the present.

Zafos Xagoraris’s research installation 2 Camps (2026) focuses on two prisoner-of-war camps that operated in Germany during the First World War: the Half-Moon Camp in Wünsdorf, where around 30,000 Arab, Indian and African prisoners were held, and the Görlitz camp, where the Fourth Corps of the Greek Army was held. Here, Xagoraris continues the research he began with The Hospitable Gate at documenta 14 in 2017, this time focusing on Wünsdorf and the recordings made there and in Görlitz by German linguist Wilhelm Doegen. For the new installation, he reconstructs a sign that pointed the way to Wünsdorf and accompanies it with sound documents from the two camps. The work brings a history of captivity into the present and shows how the voices of prisoners were recorded and preserved in the archives.

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. The work also features the logo of Marika’s, the first Café Aman in New York, opened by Marika Papagika on 34th Street. The venue brought together an eclectic clientele of Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Albanians, Arabs and Sephardic Jews and, during Prohibition, operated as an illicit café. The logo thus becomes an entry point into a world where music and gathering gave shape to the experience of diaspora.

In A Curse that Turns Gold into Ladybugs (2025), Vartan Avakian examines the myth of “Armenian gold” in Turkey 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 collective imagination.

Cevdet Erek’s new commission, Hayat (2026), was created specifically for TAVROS and shifts the experience of what an exhibition space can be. The work invites the visitor into a space between the private and the 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. The wooden structure draws on the architecture of Ottoman-era houses in Northern Greece, present-day Turkey and the Balkans, while also moving beyond a specific historical or geographical reference. Hayat returns to a basic understanding of the home that exceeds spatial boundaries, as something that can be carried, reconstructed and inhabited through memory and human relationships.

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.

A Tatavla Gothic (2025) is a novella by Marina Papazyan set in Istanbul in 1925, during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish nation-state. The narrative follows a young Greek-Armenian aspiring writer and her movement through the city’s literary and artistic circles. Through life in Tatavla and her encounters with members of Istanbul’s Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities, the novella examines the ethnic and class divisions of a changing city, as well as the multiple languages and cultural legacies that coexist within it. Drawing on literature from the late Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Turkish Republic, the work raises questions around writing, language and memory, as well as the contradictory legacies of the imperial period. The work is the second edition of TAVROS Press.

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 thought 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.

The exhibition at TAVROS is part of AMAN AMAN, a transnational cultural project taking place from June 2026 to January 2027 across Athens, Thessaloniki, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Istanbul, and Izmir. Developed by Goethe-Institut Athen, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA and TAVROS, in collaboration with Münchner Kammerspiele, Goethe-Institut Izmir, Goethe-Institut Thessaloniki, İç İçe – Festival für neue anatolische Musik, Kulturakademie Tarabya, Municipal Theatre of Piraeus, and DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum Frankfurt, the project brings together exhibitions, performances, concerts, film screenings and conversations.

For information about the programme in each city, please visit the respective websites and social media channels of the project partners.