The Berlinische Galerie is showing her film “Aşît / The Avalanche” (2022, 60 min.), produced for documenta fifteen. The inspiration and starting point comes from Stefan Zweig’s “The Royal Game”, a novella he wrote in Brazilian exile in 1942 in which the game of chess becomes a survival strategy in the face of fascism. To make „Aşît“, Öğrenci returned to her father’s hometown Müküs (Bahçesaray in Turkish) in the region of Van, near the border between Türkiye and Iran. Until 1915 its education system and its cultural heritage were multilingual, with Armenian, Kurdish, Persian and Arabic existing side by side. Today a big percentage of the inhabitants are Kurds. The title “Aşît” means both “avalanche” and “disaster” in Kurdish. It refers to the avalanche that constantly threatens to cut Müküs off from the rest of the world and to “Meds Yeghern” (literally “The Great Disaster” of 1915), when 1.5 million Armenians were killed in the genocide during the First World War.