Military parades, the Olympic Games, dance performances and beauty pageants — Köken Ergun’s video installations repeatedly address cultural and political events and the rituals that define them. Despite frequently large audiences, they also possess a semi-private character, in that they are celebrations of groups that remain mostly hidden from the general public. He accompanies his works’ protagonists over long periods of time, creating detailed insights into diverse performative cultural practices, which are often political in character. For Ruhr Ding, Ergun is showing a video work about beauty contests for Filipino migrants in Israel which he has extended site-specifically for this exhibition project. Köken Ergun [born 1976] lives in Istanbul.
