Mehmet Emir (born 1964 in Dersim/Turkey) is an artist with a focus on photography. He worked with various media and studied Contextual Painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He is active in various artistic fields (music, literature, acting), was a social worker and is currently employed at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in the field of digitization. Since his emigration to Vienna in 1981, he has been documenting his region of origin Tunceli/Dersim during annual visits.
Political turmoil since the 1960s, intended underdevelopment, enormous assimilation pressure and huge dam projects caused tremendous outmigration rates. Today the villages are often only remnants, summer quarters for the migrants during their holidays and almost extinct during the winter months. Several villages were military prohibited areas (already since the 1930s) and not accessible over decades, others were destroyed.
Although Emir's village of origin was accessible and intact, people emigrated. The former villagers sought new homes in the provincial towns before many migrated to Germany, Austria, France or the Benelux countries. The former villagers, who are transnationally dispersed, are still connected via village Facebook sites and meet each other during the summer months in their village of origin.
Emir’s collection comprises more than 36 years of photographic documentation (1983–2019), film work and music ethnological documentation of these transformations. His artistic focus is on portrait photography. Parts of his works were shown in exhibitions in London, New York, Istanbul and Vienna.
Emir documents tremendous socio-economic changes. His art-based documentations depict loss, adaptation, new orientations, emigration and its repercussions.
A photo book about Emir's work has just been published at Verlag Bibliothek der Provinz (in German).
A photo book about Emir's work has just been published at Verlag Bibliothek der Provinz (in German).
IMAGE CREDIT
© Mehmet Emir. All rights reserved
ZOZAN is based on the two extensive photographic collections of Mehmet Emir and Werner Finke.
THE
MULTIMEDIA COLLECTIONMEHMET
EMIR
