Cemetery of the Nameless – Video Work by Pinar Öğrenci

Climate change has dramatically lowered Lake Van’s water level, exposing extraordinary structures that lay hidden in the lake’s depths. These mineral deposits are the result of a millennia-lasting accumulation of calcium, carbonate, phosphate and magnesium—the very elements that human bones are made of—and take on a central role in Öğrenci’s haunting allegory.
Cemetery of the Nameless suggests an unsettling parallel between the loss of water and the loss of people’s lives: the lake Van serves as a mass grave, and these ghostly formations may well be monuments to the countless victims who perished in the region without burial—Armenians killed in the genocide of 1915-1916, Kurdish villagers shot at the Iranian borders, Afghan refugees who lost their way in the nearby mountains.
Through these interwoven narratives of displacement, persecution and flight, video installation questions the entanglement of environmental catastrophe and human suffering. Lake Van emerges not merely as a water body, but as an archive of traumatic events—a repository where the stories of the living and the dead, the human and non-human, sediment together in layers of collective memory.
Öğrenci’s use of drone technology to capture these revelations adds another dimension of complexity. The same surveillance apparatus that now revolutionises warfare through AI-enhanced precision is used to document this very landscape of violence at Turkey’s border with Iran. Since their invention in the 19th century, both photography and cinematography have been used for military purposes, but today’s satellite and drone imagery render the documentation of climate destruction and displacement chillingly efficient. By making use of this technology in order to bear witness rather than to target, Öğrenci subverts its destructive potential, transforming these tools of surveillance into instruments of testimony and remembrance.

Opening: 10/15, 6-8 PM
Exhibition: 10/20-10/25
Pinar Öğrenci's website