“Hala buradayım”
"Searching Traces"
photo by Beret Hamann
Thomas Büsch was born in Berlin (1959) and studied Visual Communication, Philosophy and Art History at the Fine Arts Academy in Kassel.
In the late 1980th and in the 1990th he took part in the Management of some central big art events like the documenta IX, American Art in the 20th Century (Martin Gropius Bau Berlin) a.o. After a residency at the PS1 Museum in NYC he moved to Istanbul in 1998 and started to travel as a filmmaker in the Middle East and Southeast Europe.
Sabine Küper-Büsch was born in Werne, D, (1966) and studied Political Science, Sociology and German Literature at the University of Hamburg.
In the 1990th she worked as a Correspondent for Turkey and its neighboring countries for different TV stations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In the 2000th she started producing documentaries with her husband Thomas Büsch and shifted her focus to art-oriented projects.
Thomas Büsch and Sabine Küper-Büsch work as filmmakers, artists and curators in an interdisciplinary way. They initiated the Mahalla festival in the name of the Istanbul based association diyalog derneği. The objectives of the association are the promotion of exchange and cooperation in order to carry out an intercultural understanding to strengthen as well as above all a cultural dialogue between communities.
In 2014/2015 they established for diyalog and in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut Istanbul an extensive program under the title “Searching Traces” with the aim to give creative people with and without migration background the opportunity to look back on and reappraise their experiences in order to find new perspectives in a changing surrounding or in the hosting countries. The project expanded internationally. Currently the Video-workshop is conducted on Zoom with participants from Afghanistan, Eritrea, Germany, Iraq, Malta, Turkey, Russia, Palestine, Syria, The Netherlands a.o.