On the mobility of “guest workers” and the immobility of white art history

In the 1960s and 1970s, artists also came to Europe's recruitment countries with the “guest workers”. This also applies to the refugees and exiles of that time. The experiences of migration and flight serve as subjects for their diverse artistic production. Nevertheless, these works are rarely found in the collections of art museums and even less in their exhibitions. Such omissions illustrate the structural racism in art history and within art institutions. My lecture sheds light on the situation in Germany. I want to tell migration history as art history, which is also life history.

Gürsoy Doğtaş is an art historian and works paracuratorially at the intersections of institutional critique, structural racism and queer studies. He has (co-)curated exhibitions such as There is no there there at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2024), Annem işçi - Wer näht die roten Fahnen? at the Museum Marta Herford in Herford (2024), Gurbette Kalmak / Bleiben in der Fremde (2023) at the Taxispalais in Innsbruck and the festival What would James Baldwin do? (2024) in Berlin as well as the symposium Public Art: The Right to to Remember and the Reality of Cities (2021) in Nuremberg. In 2022/23 he taught as a visiting professor at the Institute for Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts and from this fall he is a QuiS Visiting Research Fellow at Städelschule and Goethe University of Frankfurt.