Nilgün Serbest & Tobias Kurtz
participants in
VAD – Video Art Database
CologneOFF V – 5th Cologne Online Film Festival 2009
Nilgün Serbest:
I was born 1978 in Göppingen, Germany as the youngest of three children. My parents Sahin and Selviye Serbest are of tatar origin and came to germany in 1971 as migrant workers. Both my parents are as well descendants of migrant parents from the Dobruja region (Romania/Bulgaria). Researches on my migrant nomadic background and the decision 3 years ago to take over the german citizenship raised questions of home, identity, allienation, collective psychology and cultural emancipation.
1988 i moved to Istanbul with my sister and mother. The attempt to reestablish an existence as a family in Istanbul failed and resulted in us moving back to Göppingen 1994. There I finished school in 1999 which was also the year i moved to Berlin. I´ve been participting in
numerous art, architecture and political projects since then.
Right now i`m working on my final project for my architecture studies, which includes a eries of essayistic solo and collaborative works on the dematerialization of architecture.
The project`s location is my flat, the street i live on, shops and other people`s places in the close surrounding.
Tobias Kurtz:
I was born 1982 in Neuhaus am Rennweg in Thuringia. After finishing school in 2001 I moved to Berlin to study Urban and Regional Planning at TU Berlin in 2002. During my studies I focussed on leftover spaces and their unplanned development as well as on human rituals as means of appropriating and designing the environment beyond building.
At the same time I started working for different projects in the field of architecture, urbanism and art. In 2005 I worked for the Bauhaus Foundation Dessau on the Exhibition “Shrinking Cities IIâ€. Between 2006 and 2008 I worked on different projects for Raumtaktik, such as “Fanshop of Globalizationâ€, a travelling exhibition that made a critical comment on the FIFA World Cup 2006, “Space Time Playâ€, a book exploring the
connections between computer games, architecture and urbanism and “Updating Germany†the German contribution for the Venice Architectural Biennial 2008. Since 2008 I work for Aram Bartholl as a travelling performer of the project “Chatâ€.
Besides that I have been working with Nilgün Serbest on several performance projects in public space and videos on that topic. One of them is the film we hand in for CologneOFF
V.
Most recently I am a part of “The Action Painting Club†(www.inlovewith.net/content/artists/actionpainting-club), together with Nilgün Serbest and Ragna Körby. We bring all sorts of material, from cardboard to bodypaint or flowers into clubs and other locations to
perform a collective painting and tinkering session together with the audience and through that make people actively participate in nightlife, creating their own party-atmosphere.