Uploaded May 2025 | Updated September 2026, 32 minutes ago
16 April 2025, 19:00 PST
BAMPFA
2155 Center Street
Berkeley, CA
Moderated by Minoo Moallem, Susan Oxtoby
Sponsored by:
Mosse Lectures
Mosse Foundation
BAMPFA
UC Berkeley Department of German
UC Berkeley Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
Symposium Media and Migration in a Digital Age
For her film, presented as an installation at documenta fifteen, Pinar Öğrenci returns to her father’s hometown, Müküs, within the mountainous region in southern Van. On Turkey’s border with Iran, this former capital of the Urartian civilization, and the Armenian Vaspurakan dynasty, today has a dense urban population of mainly Kurdish-speaking communities. The town enjoyed a multilingual education and heritage in Armenian, Kurdish, Farsi, and Arabic until 1915. The Avalanche is inspired by Stefan Zweig’s final novella, The Royal Game (Schachnovelle, 1941)—a psychological thriller in which chess becomes a survival mechanism in the face of fascism.
The annual Mosse Lecture is generously supported by the Mosse Foundation and reflects the foundation’s mission to promote cultural exchange and political engagement. The Mosse Lectures were originally founded in 1997 at Humboldt University in Berlin to commemorate the history of the Mosse family, their patronage of the arts, and their contributions to intellectual life through the German-Jewish publishing house run by Rudolf Mosse and the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt.
16 April 2025, 19:00 PST
BAMPFA
2155 Center Street
Berkeley, CA
Moderated by Minoo Moallem, Susan Oxtoby
Sponsored by:
Mosse Lectures
Mosse Foundation
BAMPFA
UC Berkeley Department of German
UC Berkeley Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures
Symposium Media and Migration in a Digital Age
For her film, presented as an installation at documenta fifteen, Pinar Öğrenci returns to her father’s hometown, Müküs, within the mountainous region in southern Van. On Turkey’s border with Iran, this former capital of the Urartian civilization, and the Armenian Vaspurakan dynasty, today has a dense urban population of mainly Kurdish-speaking communities. The town enjoyed a multilingual education and heritage in Armenian, Kurdish, Farsi, and Arabic until 1915. The Avalanche is inspired by Stefan Zweig’s final novella, The Royal Game (Schachnovelle, 1941)—a psychological thriller in which chess becomes a survival mechanism in the face of fascism.
The annual Mosse Lecture is generously supported by the Mosse Foundation and reflects the foundation’s mission to promote cultural exchange and political engagement. The Mosse Lectures were originally founded in 1997 at Humboldt University in Berlin to commemorate the history of the Mosse family, their patronage of the arts, and their contributions to intellectual life through the German-Jewish publishing house run by Rudolf Mosse and the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt.
