Claiming One's Own Image

“Social norms ‘mummify‘ the woman within the concept of femininity.”

— Azade Köker

The women who arrived in West Germany through recruitment agreements brought with them a variety of languages, life stories, professions and forms of knowledge. The label “guest worker” reduced this complexity to a mere economic function. Contrary to popular belief, most of These women came to West Berlin not through Family reunification, but rather through active recruitment by the West German electronics industry. Although sought after by large corporations for their presumed fine Motor skills, they were placed in the lowest wage brackets.

Some of these women were also artists and writers. Through self-portraiture, they challenged the s tereotype of the “guest worker”, presenting themselves as individuals with distinct lives and stories: by creating their own portraits, they determined the framing, posture and gaze, as well as the conditions under which their images circulated. These works made migrant women visible and became a means of artistic self-empowerment.

The experiences reflected in these portraits found collective expression in Kreuzberg. A migrant women’s movement emerged in the late 1970s in women’s centres, feminist groups, on the streets and in squatted buildings. The movement campaigned for rights including residence status independent of marriage, access to their own housing and their own wages.

Atiye Altül

Otoportre / Self-Portrait 1–5

1984–1990

Atiye Altül’s self-portraits reflect her ongoing exploration of the self and offer a record of her life in West Germany. In the delicate pencil drawings, the artist meets the viewer’s gaze with confidence, while subtle shading already hints at a growing sense of exhaustion. In later self-portraits, her facial features appear more hardened through the use of bold contours and stark contrasts. In 1970, Altül came to West Berlin under the recruitment agreements to work in the electronics industry for Siemens and AEG-Telefunken. At the same time, she studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste and later became involved with the women’s centre run by Nachbarschaftsheim Schöneberg e.V. The works created during this period seem to give visual form to her experiences of physically demanding labour, as well as to her demands for self-determination and political participation: “Once you become a worker, you see things differently. You experience exploitation firsthand. That politicises you.”

Drawing of a person with dark hair, serious expression, and shirt.

Atiye Altül, Otoportre 3 / Selbstporträt 3, 1990, courtesy: the artist and Ayşe Tunca

Emine Sevgi Özdamar

Person viewed from behind observing portrait drawings on a white gallery wall.

Kreuzberg: Kunst und Migration seit 1960, exhibition opening, Gropius Bau, 2026

Self-Portraits

(1985)

Emine Sevgi Özdamar is a writer, actor, theatre director and artist. She first came to West Berlin in 1965 for a two-year period under the labour recruitment agreement between Turkey and West Germany, working for companies such as the electronics manufacturer Telefunken. She would process her experiences of this period in her groundbreaking novel The Bridge of the Golden Horn (1998), opening up a glimpse into the lived realities of so-called guest workers. She moved to East Berlin in 1976 to assist Benno Besson, the director of the theatre Volksbühne Berlin. In the years that followed, she continued to pursue directing and acting at various theatres across Germany and France. Sketches that she began making as memory aids during rehearsals then developed into an independent artistic language. In the mid-1980s she created the series of self-portraits shown in the exhibition. In their intensity of colour and directness, they depict an artist who used private space as a stage on which to make herself the subject.

Filiz Taşkın

The subject of the photographs Dormitory Stresemannstraße, Filiz (Room with 4 Women), Room in Dormitory Stresemannstraße, New Year’s Eve 1965 with Roommates, Hertie at Hallesches Tor, Filiz Buying a Kodak Camera, the Salesman Photographs Her, 1965, Telefunken Company Outing, Boat Trip on Lake Wannsee, 1965, Photographer: a Greek Friend and Trip to Grunewald 1 May 1965 (all: 1965/2026) is Filiz Taşkın, who came to Berlin in 1963 as a migrant worker and soon became politically active in the women’s and workers’ rights movements. As a trained seamstress, she was recruited by Telefunken to do delicate manufacturing work and was one of the first residents of the company-run women’s dormitory at Stresemannstraße 30 – not far from Gropius Bau, then still in ruins from the war. Later, she worked for Bosch where she was elected to the works council in 1972. Despite first impressions, the photographs are not spontaneous snaps but were largely staged for family and friends who remained in the countries of origin. The images are carefully framed glimpses into life in Germany, intended as a form of memorial and documentation. These photographs counter one-dimensional media representations of “guest workers” by documenting self-determined moments beyond work.

Five small photographs arranged side by side on a white wall.

Kreuzberg: Kunst und Migration seit 1960, installation view, Gropius Bau, 2026

Evanthia Tsantila

Amazon on Horseback

(2026)

Evanthia Tsantila’s works explore how cultures of remembrance shape ideas of belonging and community. In the enlarged print Amazon on Horseback, created through digital collage and painting, she appropriates Louis Tuaillon’s Imperial-era statue Amazone zu Pferde (1895), which now stands in the Kolonnadenhof on the Museumsinsel Berlin. Tsantila replaced the mythical warrior with Emilia Ginolfi, an Italian migrant worker. The piece is based on a 1972 photograph showing the recruited worker carrying the weight of stacked bricks on her head at a construction site. The text framing the image is taken from a graffito in Istanbul, itself borrowed from Gabriel García Márquez’s novel The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), which depicts a fictional military dictatorship: “But, my General, my life was love from head to toe; you simply did not understand.” The story was written during a period shaped by dictatorships and resistance movements around the world. Tsantila’s artistic representational strategy asks which identities are inscribed into collective memory and which are excluded from it.

Person in black places white paper over artwork with stylized white forms on black background.

Evanthia Tsantila

Serpil Yeter

Three figures in dark colors, middle figure nude, two others wearing hats; emotional scene.

Kreuzberg: Kunst und Migration seit 1960, installation view, Gropius Bau, 2026

ENDİŞE (Worry)

(1985)

Serpil Yeter was one of the few female artists from Turkey living in Kreuzberg, a neighbourhood shared by many migrant women who had come to West Berlin as workers, students, wives or mothers. These women’s lives here were often marked by multiple forms of discrimination, structural disadvantage and anxieties About the future. In ENDİŞE (Sorge), the female figures huddle closely together beneath a bird that seems all-powerful and reminiscent of the German national eagle. According to the artist, together, they are trying “to provide each other with support and protection.” Thus, the work can be interpreted as a reference to Yeter’s experience as a migrant woman in a country marked by racism and patriarchal structures. Through her art, Yeter advocated for women’s rights. In 1988, one of her pieces was used as the poster image for the Internationales Frauenfest (International Women’s Festival) at TIO, a meeting and information centre for women from Turkey in Kreuzberg.

More on Serpil Yeter

In the exhibition chapter “Pursued by the Past”Serpil Yeter in “Voices of Metropolis”