Recently, you graduated from the master's program Visual and Media Anthropology at Media University Berlin. Congratulations! What are you doing now?
As I studied under conditions of the pandemic, currently I am enjoying post-pandemic life. I started working for an exhibition project called Owned by Others while I was studying. Right now, we are working on the catalog of the exhibition. I am also continuing to research my thesis topic: decolonization of the art institutions. Recently, I wrote an article about the challenge of decolonization of the museums for the University of Illinois Chicago's Fwd: Museum Journal and it will be published this year.
What was the topic of your master’s thesis? Could you please tell us a bit about how you discovered your research topic? What was your greatest learning from this research experience?
My thesis topic was “A palace and protest in Berlin for the whole world: The Coalition of Cultural Workers Against the Humboldt Forum”. I am an art worker, who has been working in the field of museology for a very long time. I am also writer and editor at e-Skop, a Turkish critical art theory and politics website. I am responsible for the section we call museum politics. I have been following protest movements related to museums for the last ten years. Art washing, art workers' rights and decolonization are some of the topics that I am highly interested in.
When I moved to Berlin in 2020, the protests against the Humboldt Forum had already started. I decided to stick with this topic as I have been working on it for years and it is related to my professional field. During my research, I followed the protest group The Coalition of Cultural Workers Against the Humboldt Forum. I realized that the problem of decolonization is much deeper and more problematic than I thought. I focused on decolonization in the beginning but later, with the guidance of my thesis supervisor Dr. Mark Curran, I discovered the social and economic layers of the colonial past of Germany.