Inside The Ring: Our-Stories as Queer History in Action presents Ceren Saner’s ongoing counter-archive of queer and diasporic life, begun after her migration from Istanbul to Berlin in 2016. What started as a personal visual diary gradually became a collective one: an archive shaped through friendship, chosen family, intimacy, migration, becoming, and the everyday practices through which communities hold one another. The title carries a double reference: Berlin’s Ringbahn, the circular train route that maps a boundary around the city, and the boxing ring, evoking the acts of survival taking place within and beyond that map. Saner uses the term our-stories in place of the gendered word “history,” asking whose lives become part of historical memory and how we can participate in making our own histories visible while we are still living them in the present tense. Presented as an online exhibition and conversation, the program moves through selected works and lived moments from a decade of Inside The Ring. Rather than approaching photography as a neutral act of documentation, Saner considers image-making a form of presence, mutual witnessing, and world-building. Through photographs of tenderness, joy, vulnerability, transition, resistance, and collective care, Inside The Ring proposes queer history not as something belonging only to the past, but as something continuously being lived, made, and carried forward.

Participant Bios

Ceren Saner (she/her) is a Berlin-based, self-taught lens-based artist whose practice centers queer and diasporic narratives across photography, moving image, installation, and community-based work. Through socio-autobiographical storytelling, she explores intimacy, kinship, belonging, memory, and the relationships between personal and collective experience. Her works function as visual notes: fragments of encounters and emotions that resist closure. In 2024, Saner received first place in the Neukölln Art Prize in Berlin for her ongoing body of work Inside The Ring. Alongside her artistic practice, she works as a cultural producer, with community-building central to both areas of her practice.

Inside The Ring: Our-Stories as Queer History in Action is organized by Ceren Saner as part of the 2026 Circa: Queer Histories Festival, presented by One Institute.