Nnenna Onuoha: Entwicklungsland — Revisited & Cana Bilir-Meier: Ein neues Wort

Opening: 12. September 2025, 18:30 Uhr Reception, 19:00 Event start

As part of the project THE PAST IS NOT ANOTHER COUNTRY: DOING ARCHIVES DIFFERENTLY, SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA presents newly commissioned works by artists Cana Bilir-Meier and Nnenna Onuoha to coincide with the Berlin Art Week 2025.

Each examines the power relations present in archival image material, proposing artistic ways of restaging and reshaping historical narratives. 

Nnenna Onuoha's essayistic video work Entwicklungsland — Revisited (2025) engages with the 1975 BBC educational film Developing Country Ghana: Life in the City. Through conversations with the protagonists portrayed at the time and their current perspectives on the historical film material, a multi-layered reflection on representation, memory and postcolonial image politics emerges.

Ein neues Wort (2025) by Cana Bilir-Meier builds on a 1970 competition in West Germany that sought an alternative to the term “Gastarbeiter” (“guest worker”). In Munich, a choir made up predominantly of former labor migrants of Turkish descent draws inspiration from the more than 30,000 submissions and develops its own musical interpretation. Together with the choir, the artist explores an approach to linguistic labels that is both encouraging and deconstructive—a reappropriation of words that at times appear overtly racist, often hurtful or derogatory, yet also absurd or emptied of meaning.

Following the premiere screenings of both works on Friday 12. September, they will be viewable on a loop at SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA on Saturday and Sunday between 14:00 and 18:00. No tickets are necessary, simply come by.

Commissioned by SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA ©2025
In the framework of the project The Past is Not Another Country  - a project by SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA and DFF – Deutsches Filminstitut & Filmmuseum
Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds

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Nnenna Onuoha is a Ghanaian-Nigerian researcher, filmmaker and visual artist based in Berlin, Germany.  Her research explores monumental silences surrounding the histories and afterlives of colonialism across West Africa, Europe and the United States, asking How do we remember, which pasts do we choose to perform, and why? 

Cana Bilir-Meier is a filmmaker and artist. Her cinematic, performative and text-based works move at the intersections of archival work, text production, historical research, contemporary media reflexivity and archaeology. She is co-founder of the initiative in honour of Semra Ertan and co-editor of the poetry collection ‘Mein Name ist Ausländer - Benim Adım Yabancı’ (My Name is Foreigner).