Curator and artist Stefan Kaegi, one of the founders of Rimini Protokoll, the legendary art collective of documentary theater, is coming to Istanbul on March 31 to present one of his latest projects, “Conference of the Absent”. The following day, Kaegi will also lead a workshop for theater professionals at Kundura Sahne. With his award-winning and controversial projects, he is one of the star creators of the European stage.

Born in 1972 in Solothurn, Switzerland, Stefan Kaegi studied art at the F+F School of Art and Design in Zurich.

Together with Helgard Haug and Daniel Wetzel, whom he met during their school years in the ’90s, he founded Rimini Protokoll in 2000. Theatre der Zeit, one of Germany’s most established theater publications, greeted the collective, which went on to make a powerful impact on the theater world, as “the heroes and founders of a new realism on stage.”

In “Deutschland 2”, a performance created especially for the 2002 Theater der Welt Festival, he and 200 citizens of Bonn re-enacted an entire session of the German Parliament. The performance, which the then President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Thierse, tried to block on the grounds of ‘the privacy of the house,’ sparked a heated debate in Germany about artistic freedom and the relationship between politics and art.

His projects “Mnemopark” (2005), which won the Jury’s Special Prize at the Politik im Freien Theater Festival; “Cargo Sofia” (2006), which takes the audience on a journey inside a truck accompanied by two Bulgarian truck drivers; and “Karl Marx – Das Kapital, Band 1” (2007), adapted from the foundational work of Marxism, have been staged at major festivals around the world.

He received the Faust Theater Prize in 2007, the Europe Theatre Prize in 2008 and the European Award for Cultural Diversity in 2010.

Inspired by the way the call to prayer in Egypt under Hosni Mubarak was recited from a single center and broadcast live over the radio, he created “Radio Muezzin”, a project with which he toured many countries and which won the Jury’s Special Prize at the Sarajevo Theater Festival in 2011. That same year, he was honored with the Silver Lion at the Venice Theater Festival.

The transatlantic telephone performance staged live between an employee of a call center in India and audience members in different countries around the world, “Call Cutta in a Box” (2012), and the simulation of the United Nations Climate Change Conference “Welt-Klimakonferenz” (2014) earned him an Honorary Mention from Ars Electronica, the Austrian institute for culture, education and science.

Launched in 2013 and designed especially for evolving cities, his project “Remote X” has been adapted to 55 different cities, including Shanghai, Moscow and New York. In 2015 the project earned him a nomination for the Golden Mask Award of the Russian Theater Festival, and that same year he received the Swiss Grand Award for Theatre, which honors the year’s most influential figures in the theater world.

In 2014, “Situation Rooms”, a multiplayer video installation about the arms industry, received the Excellence Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival.

In 2018, he marked a new turning point in the use of artificial intelligence in theater with “Uncanny Valley”, for which he built and put on stage an android (a humanoid robot) that is virtually a clone of the German writer Thomas Melle.

His recent acclaimed works include the interactive installation “Nachlass” (2018), about people who do not have long left to live, and “Temple du présent” (2021), in which we watch a live octopus give a solo performance on stage.

Kaegi, who also creates works specifically for museums, most recently presented his eco-installation “win < > win” and his ‘walkable film’ “Urban Nature” at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB).

Kundura Sahne’s co-production with Kaegi, the Istanbul adaptation of his “Remote X” project, “Remote İstanbul”, continues to meet art lovers in Türkiye.