Special Gallery Weekend will consist of a talk and a workshop:
TALK: “‘Tragedy of a Beardless Boy’: Selected Chapters with Gökcan Demirkazık” 3 pm – Schwules Museum*
“Tragedy of a Beardless Boy”: Selected Chapters ah you are a joker have you never put on hamlet to be or not to be is the real question my cheeks are yul bryner would you like a boxwood comb (from Arkadaş Z. Özger’s “Tragedy of a Beardless Boy”)”
Tragedy of a Beardless Boy” is the title of a poem by the socialist queer poet Arkadaş Z. Özger (1948-1973), whose outstanding work despite the brevity of his life has slipped away from the public imaginary. Taking the intersubjectivity and the debate on gender(ed) signs in this poem as a point of departure, Gökcan Demirkazık will reflect on the lack of a foundational myth for queer art from Turkey and trace the concept of “mobility” in examples from individual artistic practices that deal with gender issues, including those of Taner Ceylan, Lukas Duwenhögger, Gülsün Karamustafa, Aykan Safoğlu, Metehan Özcan, and Nil Yalter. The talk will also examine – from a particularly personal point of view – how queer history-writing becomes a prerequisite for queer futurity at the hand of some of these artists.
Gökcan Demirkazık is a curator and writer living in Istanbul. His writing has previously appeared in Artforum, Frieze, ArtAsiaPacific, Hyperallergic, m-est.org, ArtUnlimited, and Istanbul Art News. He currently works as a Research/Editorial Assistant at SALT
“TALK: ‘Tragedy of a Beardless Boy’: Selected Chapters with Gökcan Demirkazık” is part of the side event program of “ğ- soft g – queer forms migrate”
*This side event will be in English
WORKSHOP / READING: “Fucking Germany – Das letzte Tabu oder mein Leben als Escort” with Esma Gülsoy, Adir Jan Tekin, Emrah Gökmen, Birol Işık. 4pm – Schwules Museum*
“Cem is a professional escort. He is getting paid for sex. Around 100 Euros is what you have to pay to get your needs of quick sex, humiliation and domination, of devotion and feeling safe satisfied. So far, this is no news. However, entirely unknown is the extent of this specific branch of the service industry, the degree of unionizing and the variety of its costumers: managers, visitors of fair trades, the saleswoman of a perfume shop, welfare recipients or the family man in your neighborhood. Cem Yıldız delivers insights of a world in which excess, violence, drugs and unrelieved despair are part of the daily life and which alternates between urinals (maybe: public toilettes?), hotel suits, desperate hustlers and three star escorts. An unique insider report: “Fucking Germany – The last taboo or my life as an escort”, Westend Verlag, 2009.”
*This side event will be in German