On the occasion of the 15th Istanbul Biennale the InEnArt team and diyalog will open the Mahalla festival on September 14th at Contemporary Istanbul.

Mahalla is the first festival of an emerging network of global players working in the field of arts and culture focusing on the current migration flow. The festival takes place in the frame of parallel events of the 15th Istanbul Biennial between September 13 and October 20.

Pınar Öğrenci is an artist and writer based in Istanbul. Her work has been significantly influenced by war, migration and activist impulses in recent years.

Feeling helpless in the face of the news of so many deaths that kept coming from southeastern Turkey in 2015, she became engaged in an initiative called I am walking for peace.  The initiative demanded an end to the murder of the civilian population and called for the peace process to be restarted in 2015 in Turkey.

Öğrenci was arrested on the 31 December 2015, when the I am walking for peace initiative arrived in Diyarbakır, the main city of the Kurdish area of Turkey. Along with 23 peace marchers, she was detained for 4 days. After her release she was the first artists in resident of Artists at Risk-Safe Haven Athens in 2016 funded by the EU Re-Build Refuge Europe project.

DEPO Istanbul, a space for critical debate and cultural exchange, presents until 12 March 2017 the exhibition Mekân: Stories of Syrian Refugees by NarPhotos Collective.

Twelve photographers from NarPhotos Collective, took photos in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Greece and Germany since the beginning of the civil war in 2011, and turned them into features which trace different themes relating to Syrian refugees. The exhibition includes 54 photographs compiled from those photo stories.