Banu Cennetoglu

An artist mentioned by UNITED, as an example of use of the United list . (liverpool) (Tr): Barcelona Metro, Basel SBB billborads (Ates 2023)

The List, 2007–ongoing

Since 2007, Cennetoğlu has been developing The List[14] in collaboration with UNITED for Intercultural Action, an Amsterdam-based network in support of migrants and refugees.[15] The work is a collection of data about thousands of immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees who died on their way to or at the border of the European Union since 1993.[16] It is presented in multiple forms, including posters, billboards,[17] newspaper supplements,[18] and public screens,[19] in various cities, including Amsterdam, Athens, Basel, Istanbul, Sofia, Bonn, Milano, Los Angeles, Berlin, London, and Liverpool.[14]The List featured data about 7,128 individuals when first exhibited in Amsterdam in 2007. As of May 2018, it includes 34,361 cases.[13] Cennetoğlu does not consider the project “an art piece”; she does not edition it, sell it or sign it.[20] Although she doesn’t consider this project an artwork, she acknowledges a connection between The List and her artistic practice, as her artworks deal with witness-bearing.[21] This work exemplifies how Cennetoğlu assumes different positions such as caretaker and a facilitator—not only an author—when she deals with lists and archives.[22]

  Governments don’t keep these record for the public; they don’t want the public to see these records because it exposes their policies, so you have NGOs trying to put data together, and that data is incomplete and fragile, but there again someone has to do it. And I want to contribute to that with what I have and what I do—but not by aestheticizing it. You cannot represent this kind of darkness through art. [21]   

The 2017 edition was distributed as an insert in Tagesspiegel Berlin edition.[23][24] The 2018 edition was printed and distributed as a supplement by The Guardian in a print run of 210,000 on World Refugee Day, June 20, 2018.[25][26] Subsequently, it was exhibited in the form of posters at Great George Street in Liverpool as part of the Liverpool Biennial 2018 and in conjunction with Cennetoğlu’s solo exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery, London.[13] On August 1, 2018, the posters in Liverpool were anonymously destroyed and removed.[27][28][29] Some suggested that a council worker may have mistaken the work as an illegal poster and taken it down, but a spokesperson from the city council refused the allegation.[30] The work was reinstalled on August 5, 2018, but was vandalised again shortly afterwards.[31]

Extract taken from (“Banu Cennetoğlu” 2023)