Kopfstand/Headstand - Aras Ören zum 75.Geburtstag

In celebration of the 75th birthday of Aras Ören

Turkish writer, Member of the German Academy of Arts, Berlin

December 2, 2014 - January 10, 2015

When Aras Ören’s volume of poetry Privatexil came out in 1977, Peter von Becker wrote about this book as well as about the previously published poems Was will Niyazi in der Naunynstrasse (1973) and Der kurze Traum aus Kagithane (1974) in the German weekly DIE ZEIT: “Aras Ören’s poems belong in my view to the most beautiful texts, and the most significant, not just in an interior literary sense, that have been written in German-speaking countries in recent years.”

Almost forty years have passed since then, and until the end of the millennium, Aras Ören, who had settled in 1969 in West Berlin and worked not just as a writer, but also as journalist for the radio and TV station Sender Freies Berlin, where he finally also headed the editorial staff of RBB’s Radio Multikulti, published more than 30 books in German: volumes of poetry, novels, stories...

In 1983, he has been honoured by the Bavarian Academy of Arts, in 1985 he received the Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Award, in 1999 he lectured poetics at the Tübingen University, and in May 2012 Aras Ören was appointed a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin.

However, for more than ten years, Aras Ören, who continued to publish new literary works in Turkey, was strangely no longer published in Germany – until now.

We are very pleased indeed to be able to not just present finally a German book by this Turkish Berlin author: Kopfstand, a beautiful volume of stories published just a week ago by Verbrecher Verlag. But there is more: Aras Ören’s stories were congenially illustrated by Wolfgang Neumann, whom our gallery has been representing since 2009. In our exhibition, we present all 48 drawings printed in Kopfstand, executed by the artist in pencil or watercolour pencil.

We are very pleased indeed to be able to present also a festschrift with texts by German writers Friedrich Christian Delius, Peter Schneider, and Jürgen Theobaldy, well-known colleagues and long-standing friends of the Turkish poet and novelist.

Ceci n'est pas une Festschrift – for certain reasons, the title is inspired by a famous painting by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte – is available at the gallery, and also at bookstores.

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