Pınar Öğrenci did not expect to spend the last day of 2015 hiding in a shopping mall, nor to ring in the new year in jail. The artist had traveled from Istanbul to Diyarbakır for a peace march opposing the Turkish government’s militarized crackdown on alleged insurgents in the Kurdish-majority city. At the demonstration, riot police dispersed the crowd using tear gas and a water cannon, prompting Öğrenci and other protestors to take shelter in the nearby mall. This harrowing experience is documented in her video installation A New Year’s Eve (2021), presented in “Fear, No Fear” (2021) at Times Art Center Berlin.

Shaky footage of protestors huddled in shops and corridors is projected onto a large screen of sewn-together tissues. Öğrenci tinted the video red so the anxious figures appear as though under the menacing glow of emergency lighting. In a corner of the gallery is a pile of sugar cubes, on which a second projection shows people fleeing the snowy streets, and a woman offering the artist a sweet as the protestors hunker down inside the mall. As Öğrenci recounts in a booklet—copies of which are tucked inside a backpack nailed on the wall—Kurdish shopkeepers were handing out sugar, water, and tissues to help the tear-gassed protestors. We also learn of how Öğrenci nearly lost the displayed backpack—and the camera with which she shot this artwork’s footage—in her ensuing arrest by Turkish anti-terror police.

A New Year’s Eve hinges on a sense of precarity, from the tense scenes of cornered protestors to the scuffed bag that miraculously evaded confiscation. Sugar and tissue, too, are fragile and ephemeral, yet, in aggregate, they become makeshift screens for Öğrenci’s videos to unfold. The installation indexes grief and struggle but also resourcefulness and solidarity, emphasizing the unlikely acts on which resistance is borne.