Hi(e)sTV 7

Hi(e)sTV
10.10 – 22.11.2025 / Apartment Project

Hi(e)sTV Team: Özge Açıkkol, Selda Asal, Emre Birişmen, Eralp Orkun Cihan, encounterlab – Selim Hill + Asya Birsel, Raha Faridi, Michael Fesca, Şifa Girinci, Seçil Yersel

Guest Participants: Mert Akbal, Ceren Oykut, Nour Sokhon

Guest Actors: Can Haykır, Ata Haykır, Ece Eldek, Sofia Antzel, Kai Hülzer, Sena Nur Baş, Elika Lakner

The Hi(e)sTV Platform brings together artists from Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, and Germany who have migrated in the past decade to collectively rethink what migration, belonging, and identity mean in a world increasingly fragmented by wars, ideologies and borders. The idea of HisTV first emerged in 2015, during a time of political turmoil in Turkey, when freedom of speech and expression were being systematically erased, friends and artists were being arrested, and the atmosphere was filled with fear and uncertainty. Conceived by Selda Asal as a way to respond to these ruptures, the platform has since evolved into a broader, transnational dialogue. In 2025, with the participation of artists from Iran and Lebanon, the project was renamed Hi(e)sTV, connecting the Turkish word His (feeling) with its Arabic and Persian counterparts Hes—a linguistic bridge symbolizing shared emotional and political realities.

Through short films, collective productions and performative situations, Hi(e)sTV transforms the exhibition space into a living TV channel that reprograms familiar broadcast formats. The recordings will continue at the studio space of the channel in the opening hours of the exhibition. In these times, humor, empathy and irony become strategies of survival and resistance. The featured works explore the absurdities and emotional fractures of migration: Hi(e)sTV News adopts the news channel format and the language, turning the “real news” into a poetic and critical mirror of our times. News from a Blindfold Game spreading rapidly across the world, an enormous ecological disaster and a chaotic escape ending at a crack are some themes focused on. Besides the news, Weather Report becomes a surreal forecast from a collapsing world, blending personal despair and cosmic disorder; Pikachu News appear, reflecting on police violence against protesters in different parts of the world by using the figure of Pikachu, the work places the character within scenes of protest and repression, offering a collective and ironic commentary on the absurd coexistence of innocence and authority; Bureaucratopia turns the endless paperwork of migration into a satirical game show, reflecting on the confusion and dehumanization of bureaucratic systems; Lost & Found offers a fictional consultancy for what one loses when moving to a new country; like language, reflexes, memories, or roots; the program hosts its guests and listening to them on their losses while offering them life saving insights; Upside Down revisits an old fitness video as an aesthetic inversion: an outdoor gym session turned inside out. In recent years, political and social landscapes have undergone similar reversals, where once-unshakable ideals of democracy and truth have been distorted beyond recognition. Within this warped reality, we keep training, still trying to stay in shape as everything else falls apart. In the style of handmade cutout animations, Adjust attaches numbers and letters to and from a kind of blackboard. Each added letter readjusts the semantic content.

By turning daily life, loss, and displacement into a fictional TV flow, Hi(e)sTV constructs an archive of news and feelings. It records not only stories but also gestures, hesitations, and emotions, those small traces that reveal how we continue to exist, feel, and imagine in times of rupture and uncertainty.

Funded by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe.