50000, Istanbul Queer Art Collective, 2014, 14 min. 47 sec.
A roundtable discussion on orientalism with Istanbul Queer Art Collective, MustKika, Erkan Affan, and Hakan Sandal-Wilson.
This informal workshop on the topic of orientalism will take the form of a roundtable as we discuss the various ways in which we counter, or perhaps sometimes manifest, orientalism in our works; whether through the academy, performance, or music.
About the artists
Erkan Affan is a researcher, producer, curator and audio-visual artist based between London and Iskenderun (Hatay Province). Erkan is Indigenous Arab-Armenian from the cities of Iskenderun and Antakya in southern Turkey/northern Syria, and is the conceptualiser and lead artistic commissioner of the LUBUNYA Dispatches programme, as well as co-commissioner of this year’s Transpose at the Barbican and co-programmer of the Talks programme at the nightclub FOLD in east London.
Hakan Sandal-Wilson is an LSE Fellow in Race and Gender at the Department of Sociology at the LSE, and an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies. He completed his MA in Cultural Studies at Istanbul Bilgi University, and PhD at the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies in 2021.
Istanbul Queer Art Collective was founded in 2012 to engage in live art, with a view that the documentation of performance is an art form in itself. The collective is currently based in London and is comprised of its two founding members Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergul, who are firm believers in what Jack Halberstam calls the “queer art of failure” and what Renate Lorenz calls “radical drag”. Their performances range from the durational to the intimate and can morph towards other forms like sound art or installation.
Must KiKA was born in Istanbul and graduated from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Textile Design. Kika has been a make-up artist since 2010. In the last few years, they started to concentrate on stage works by using their skills on make-up, textile and dance. During the pandemic times, they created a series of erotic textile surface works. As a multi-skilled drag performer, Kika has been on stage in various platforms of Istanbul since 2018. In 2020, they took a part as an actor in the short film titled ‘Free Fun’. They will debut an original piece as part of Transpose 2023 this coming June at the Barbican Centre in London, UK.
no. 236848.