Merle Kröger

In the recent push to install protective nets on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, it was revealed that most suicides take place with the jumper facing the city, not the ocean. While this could be a simple matter of logistics, it prompted ruminations about the idea of suicide as the ultimate escape from something, rather than towards the unknown. Fugtivity, as a curatorial concept, takes this same pivot, recasting the idea of the refugee into someone actively choosing an alternative.

In 1983, after months of fighting extradition from Germany, young Turkish activist Cemal Kemal Altun chose an alternative, leaping to his death from the window of a courthouse in Berlin-Tiergarten. The news of his passing was broken to his family on camera, as part of a report for Panorama. The journalist, Navina Sundaram, had built her career advocating for a “New World Communication Order” that could help correct the biases perpetuating what she called “a neo-cultural colonialism.” While the activist’s suicide provoked strong political repercussions, Sundaram’s report refused to abandon who he was as a person. Her decision to preempt prepared interviews with this raw footage was met with strong criticism, including from her colleague, Peter Gatter, who sparred with Sundaram on air over the ethics of broadcasting this traumatic moment.

Merle Kröger pieces together this story in her audio installation, which explores wider aspects of Altun’s death within the context of anti-immigrant rhetoric in Germany since the 1980s. Kröger previously helped develop The Fifth Wall, an archive of Sundaram’s work as a filmmaker and editor. She used this insight to analyze the circumstances around Altun’s trial in her literary essay Panorama, upon which this work is based.

Text: Kate Sutton