Artworks from the 'Queer forms migrate' exhibition
While heightened political tensions between Turkey and Europe grab the world's attention, an exhibition at Berlin's Schwules Museum refreshingly highlights the bridge between Berlin and Istanbul for the queer community.
Activism on stilettos
Fatma Souad is one of the most famous Kreuzberg drag queens. She's known for her smokey eyes, cherry lips, and big, wavy hair, but her significance goes beyond the representation of a sassy female character as portrayed here by Cihangir Gümüştürkmen. In fact, it was she who cemented Berlin's queer migrant community by starting the gay migrant parties "Gayhane" in SO36 in the 1990s.
Not so sweet memories
Despite general opinion, Erinç Seymen sees many similarities between sadomasochist practices and state oppression. The evolving patterns of his drawings stage a landscape where pain becomes pleasure (and vice versa) and where viewers experience both the arousing atmosphere of the clubs near Berlin's Nollendorfplatz and the shocking display of resistance against the state.
Haberdashery and sex
When Viron Erol Vert was growing up in Istanbul, he would go to his aunt's tailor shop in one of the city's shopping passages every day. As a teenager, he discovered a sex cinema right next to it, which inspired him to create "İnci Pasajı," a sling covered by a kilim, both a sex toy and a magical carpet that takes viewers on a fantastic trip to one's adolescence in Turkey's capital.
The Turkish-German wedding
Yeşim Akdeniz's artwork refers to a Turkish wedding house that was situated near Berlin's Bülowstraße U-Bahn station. The paintings of jackets, ties, and handkerchiefs document Turkish wedding traditions and create a dialogue about gender roles by letting people guess about the wearers of the costumes. Visitors can either be part of the conversation or stay behind the installation and observe.
Madama Butterfly
Mehtap Baydu is a Kurdish artist who described her performance "Cocoon" as the "reconstruction of the body through queer resistance." For the piece, she made a thread from shirts she'd asked for from every man she met in Germany. During her filmed performance, which was realized in 2015 in documenta-Halle in Kassel, Germany, Baydu knitted a cocoon around herself and eventually disappeared.
Male-to-male drag
Masist Gül was a legendary actor. He rose to prominence in the 70s as the archetype of hypermasculinity. The exhibition presents the bodybuilder's different face via pensive books, dreamy illustrations, or melancholic poems that were found in a second-hand bookstore in Istanbul. They reveal Gül's soft, fragile, and lonesome side that often borders on queer.
An acrobatic lesbian dream
Why is there a plastic rose gushing out of a man's shoe, planting a sensual kiss on the tip of a ceramic dildo? It's Nilbar Güreş interpretation of the lesbian orgasm. The piece, commissioned for the Sao Paulo Biennial, plays with the word sapatao, which is both a big shoe and a butch lesbian in Brazilian Portuguese. The action takes places on a low table with a traditional Turkish tablecloth.