Kurceren, F: Pithead

Fatih Kurceren's picture series "Pithead" attempts to perceive the Ruhr area as a place where identities and firmly established social structures dissolve. For more than 150 years, the region between Ruhr and Lippe has been shaped by immigration and the meeting of diverse cultures. [...] Fatih Kurceren - himself an immigrant - directs his unbiased view at the region and its inhabitants. To this end, he moves along the blurred edges of a society whose centre seems as unclear as the questions about its norms, about its interior and exterior, and about what is foreign and peculiar to it. It is the people themselves who are placed at the centre and who are seen in casual stagings and observations as those who re-create their self and their surroundings from moment to moment. The much-cited structural change does not seem to come true for these people. [...] Yet the people are not to be shown as mere victims of social grievances, but as actors of their own life plans (Tobias Zielony).