++++ Fun City can be read in the neon writing above the entertainment centre in Istanbul, and a hit song about green hills and violets can be heard on the street. Green hills and violets -- the boy with the hazy gaze and the encrusted fingernails knows the lyrics by heart. He sings with eyes half closed, wandering through the passage, a cloth with solvent in his hand which he raises to his mouth every couple of minutes.
The other three small boys on the strip of grass are at most eight years old. "We are here because of our fathers," says one of them, "fathers stink". And the way they laugh, embrace each other and tell each other scenes from films which they have dreamt up makes it seem as if it were possible to have something resembling happy moments even in misery, in a state of being socially excluded. If only there were not the disturbing sexual movements of the hand and grimaces which certainly do not come just from listening to adults, but from experience.
The film, This Is Disney World, which Esra Ersen has made about the street children of Istanbul, does not go to the root of the matter in the way a good documentary film perhaps would attempt. The artist, who was born in Ankara in 1970, is not an observer in the journalistic sense. She brings herself into the situation, takes initiatives, makes contact without herself appearing in her work. But on the basis of how the children react to her, what they tell her, how they explain the world to her using the window display of a photo shop, it can be seen to what degree Esra Ersen as a person plays a role in her film.
The street children of Istanbul think they are being taken seriously by the artist with the camera and they do not pretend with her. Here, you can be sure, nothing can be saved. The children know that, who really should be running around in a school playground with their sandwiches, instead of lying on the pavement with glue. What they tell her sounds shockingly old and without the skerrick of an illusion. "Our destiny is predetermined. It is written on our foreheads: idiot."
Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Holbeinstraße 1, until 25 August. hoh