"When you grow up in a city where you can't talk about its past, its former people and culture, you feel like you are part of its guilt. Carrying this strange weight of guilt on my shoulders, I travelled high in the mountains and arrived to my father’s town Müküs. Under the Armenian Vaspuragan Kingdom, Müküs was an Armenian Principality, also known as ‘Moks’. Throughout history, the small settlement of Müküs was not conquered by large empires and was ruled by Kurds during most of its history, at least until the beginning of the 20th century. The reason I’m interested in Müküs is not only because it's my fathers hometown but also because it has been blessed with the knowledge of long years of self-imposed isolation; like a river that feeds itself, which stays unpolluted and clear... It is an environment of non-conflict fostered by its geographical isolation, an oasis where wild capitalism and state apparatuses entered too late. Or in other words: a time machine protected by the mountains as poet Fırat Demir wrote once… But this time machine can also be imagined as a kind of prison. So it's like a hotel room where Zweig's character, Doctor B. is isolated." Playing Chess Against Yourself – an interview with artist Pınar Öğrenci by curator and writer Anna Bitkina (DAI, 2018) for MetropolisM.