This installation is the result of an experiment performed in the biology lecture hall of a Cologne high school. It involved the picture of a painting from 1814 that was projected onto a wall and shows the famous Vienna Winter Riding School, with smartly dressed people in the balconies watching cavalrymen poking papier mâché heads with their lances. The game, called “Poking Turk Heads”, was a popular amusement at the court of the Habsburg
empire until the 19th century. After the projection, Esra Ersen asked the pupils to model clay heads that render their feelings when they hear the word “Turk”. In the installation, the heads were placed on turntables in the biology hall where the image of the painting had been projected.

“E” once again takes a journey through time in the following video, ‘A Possible History II’. Visiting Istanbul’s Military Museum, the character discovers how national mythology can be developed, and Esra Ersen examines how comics, museums, school books, and television series present cultural phenomena. Focusing on the narratives that have accompanied Turkey’s nation building since the beginning, the video evokes the contradictions that arise from nonlinear perspectives  serving political interests. With this work, the artist examines who holds sovereignty over the interpretation of visual culture and who decides what is to be shown, and what shall remain hidden.

Esra Ersen created the work ‚I am Turkish, I am honest, I am hardworking‘ in collaboration with the fourth grade of the primary school in Velen, a town near Münster. One week long, the pupils wore Turkish school uniforms and noted their impressions in a diary. Subsequently, the artist had the pupils’ statements printed on uniforms designed in Turkey. They convey ideas such as social equality and a classless nation and refer to morality, state policy and educational ideology. Moreover, the title of the work quotes the first three lines of an oath that Turkish children take in primary school.

The series deals with two issues in Italy: on the one hand, waste management, which has been a profitable business for the Mafia for decades and prevented the state from financing proper incineration plants; on the other hand, the large number of refugees who often live hopelessly and suffer exploitation. Due to such a confusing situation, the country is deeply divided and the social climate fosters far-right positions. The artists transforms the heaps of dirt, gathered by illegal immigrants who sweep the streets for small donations, into still lifes that evidence the presence of refugees and are thus allegories of the Italian social problems.

Three girls with long dark hair cut the black stripes out of German flags and sew the yellow and red ones back together. In this way, the German national flag becomes the flag of the football club “Galatasaray Istanbul”. Subsequently, the black-haired girls lie down on the stripes and the flags regain their tricolour character. The video thus not only scrutinizes the concept of national unity, but also suggests that all members of a given society have a constitutive role in the production of national identity. No one is in the penalty area, everyone is on the pitch.