Inside Istanbul: Queer art and resistance

Cover photo:
“Hello I’m Leman, a woman artist from Turkey”,
Leman Sevda Daricioglu, Two-channel video installation,
Photo by Merve Bektaş, 2017, Istanbul
Produced in collaboration with Performistanbul

As an openly nonbinary person, I have been working in the cultural, and art scene in Istanbul for a long time, contributing to museums and galleries. Throughout my artistic journey, I have also volunteered for Istanbul Pride. Being queer has always been a central part of my identity, and I have embraced it fully. It became a way to send a message—defiant toward homophobic individuals, and reassuring for closeted queer people: you don’t have to come out if you’re not ready, and you’re not alone.

I’ve followed many queer artists, and was fortunate to work with some of them during my curatorial experience in Istanbul. We were lucky to find spaces to showcase queer works back then. However, especially since 2015, I can no longer confidently say that such safe spaces exist for queer art and artists. I refer to 2015 because that’s when I moved to Istanbul—for an internship in the summer of that year. I don’t know what Istanbul was like before then; I only know the stories from friends or what I’ve seen in archives. In 2013, the Gezi protests happened in Istanbul and spread to other cities. For the first time, people from all walks of life came together to support a common cause. It’s truly an honor to witness that kind of unity, even if only through stories.

Over time, we witnessed countless assaults–by both the government and homophobic individuals. Queer people, including trans women, trans men, and cis women, have always faced immense challenges from local communities, the state, and political cis-tems. We were often deemed unacceptable. Our solidarity lies primarily within our community who support and understand us. Although our community is small and resources are limited, we continue to create joyful lives for ourselves and support one another with sincerity.

10 months ago in Istanbul, police raided a queer bar, arrested people who were there, and police banned a film festival, which was set to open with a movie titled Queer. Queer activists in Turkey have also been vocal in their support for Palestine during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Many have taken to the streets in solidarity, only to face police violence and arrests. And five months ago, the mayor of Istanbul, Ekrem İmamoğlu, was arrested without cause. And the government arrested many students for participating in the pro-democracy demonstrations. In June, Trans Pride March and the Istanbul Pride March, held one week apart, were attacked by the police. For the first time in the history of Pride marches in Turkey, three people were arrested. These incidents reflect the broader repression faced by queer people and dissidents in Turkey. Yet they continue to resist and make their voices heard. Despite these incidents and the ongoing challenges in Turkey, queer artists persist in showcasing their powerful works, defying the odds.

It’s such an honor to work with queer artists and curators, and to host queer art in galleries and institutions.

I asked a question to highlight their strength and visibility, to truly understand them within this political cis-tem.

Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu is a Berlin-based performance artist whose work boldly explores themes of the body, identity, and transformation. Originally from Turkey, Leman uses performance as a medium to challenge societal norms and push the boundaries of personal and collective expression. Often drawing from queer and feminist perspectives, their work delves into vulnerability, resilience, and the politics of survival–creating deeply immersive and thought-provoking experiences. Their presence in the Berlin and Istanbul art scenes continues to amplify diverse narratives and foster dialogue around identity and the body.

How would you describe your work, and its engagement with queer art, particularly within the context of the Turkish political system?

My practice—spanning long-durational live performances, video, installation, and public interventions—centers on the question: whose lives matter? Through a Southwest Asian queer lens, I re-appropriate hegemonic narratives by engaging with histories of resistance and community formations. My work explores the vulnerability, strength, and resilience of marginalized–particularly queer, bodies–with an emphasis on necropolitics and chronopolitics. I address the legacies of totalitarianism and hegemonic power, while also responding to the global rise of fascism and conservatism. For me, queerness is not only a reference to LGBTQI+ identities but also a (Muñozian) utopian perspective—a critique of normative systems and a vision for building new worlds.
As a female-passing queer artist, my experiences of violence and marginalization have shaped my inquiry: Whose lives and deaths are valued? How does systemic fungibility shape existence? How can we resist colonial cis-heteropatriarchy and find empowerment? Moving to Europe amplified these questions as I confronted external projections imposed on my white-passing, yet Middle Eastern queer body. This led me to explore Southwest Asian queer re-appropriation beyond binaries such as resistance/defeat, strength/vulnerability, past/present/future. My work envisions persistence rather than hope and integrates ritualism with theoretical and archival research.

Being from Turkey has had a constitutive impact on my practice. The country’s fractured historical memory—shaped by modernization policies, forced language and alphabet changes, inaccessible archives, and unaddressed genocides—has informed my methodological approach to archival research and my focus on what remains obscured. In recent years, I have investigated how Turkey’s shift toward totalitarianism is historically linked to the establishment of the Republic and its modernization processes. These inquiries have helped me contextualize the resurgence of explicit fascism worldwide. 

At the same time, my experiences in Turkey are not solely defined by hegemonic violence but also by resistance strategies, organizing practices, and networks of solidarity. While the political landscape has drastically shifted since my participation in these movements in the early 2010s, I continue to learn from the current evolving queer strategies and community methods and carry the learning coming from the “old times” into my present work. 

Last year, when curator Melih Aydemir invited me to participate in A Crack We Sprout Through with the question of queer methods and strategies outside the Western world–my mind immediately turned to the Cemetery of Kimsesiz (‘those who have no one’ in Turkish); where the unclaimed dead is buried, such as queers, victims of femicide and honor crimes, Kurdish people who vanished due to the state violence (despite the claiming of their family claiming), refugees, premature babies, underclass people. It was also because, in the past few years, we’ve lost so many friends and allies in Istanbul’s queer community and in my mind, I have memories of the trans funerals I have been to and how the most pressing question was whether the deceased would be claimed–and whether we, as a community, could be the ones to claim them. During my volunteering years in the Lambdaistanbul LGBTI+ Association, we tried to claim the bodies of murdered trans people to ensure their ceremonies could be held and that they could be buried in a regular cemetery with a tombstone. Yet we were often halted by the legal system, which grants final decision-making to the biological family only. As a result, they were buried in the Cemetery of Kimsesiz. So death is not the great leveler, for all of us and we need infrastructures and structures to ensure each and every one to be treated worthily. And consequently, we need to come together, we need to unite, we need to be a community to hold each other up and not let the hegemonic power dynamics erase our lives, our existences. 

With Performistanbul joining our regular meetings with Melih, Kimsesiz project took shape between Istanbul and Berlin–through in-person meetings and online video calls. Discussions on ethics, care, trauma, marginalization, loss, mourning, and community informed our approach. I invited my dear friends Kübra Uzun and Onur Tayranoğlu to join me in a mourning ritual at Kimsesiz. Performistanbul facilitated site visits, spoke with cemetery guards, and documented the space before our first visit, while the SANATORIUM team generously facilitated the entire production process. 

We had online video calls with Kübra and Onur where we shared how we were going and what we had been doing in life at that time. I told them that I wanted us to go there and hold a mourning ritual–even though it felt like an impossible attempt, as we didn’t and wouldn’t even know the names of the deceased. 

At first we did not talk about our losses, friends and loved ones who passed, or our own fears. Instead we talked about boundaries, consent, and silence. How would we hold space for one another during the ritual? How would we react if one of us had an emotional breakdown? Who would like to be approached in such a circumstance, and in what ways? How do we respect boundaries but when/how might we break them if needed, and to what extent? 

We visited Kimsesiz and stayed there for several hours with Kübra, Onur, Performistanbul, Gülbin Eriş–my videographer and friend with whom I have worked since 2017–and Mert, the driver of the gallery. When we went there to carry out the ritual a few days later, we found ourselves confronted by the stark reality of Kimsesiz: eight bodies were being brought for burial, as we heard from the volunteer gravedigger. After checking in with each other, we decided to leave and return later. 

We were all paralysed with heavy feelings and puzzled by many questions. We talked and talked, and agreed to hold the ritual together not only as three of us but with the entire production team–yet not to film it. This mourning ritual could not be a performative gesture for aesthetic representation. After hours of watering the freshly buried graves and spreading plant and succulent seeds across them, just as we were about to finish the ritual, I and Gülbin, recorded close-up footage of our hands filling plastic bottles at the cemetery fountain–with everyone’s consent. 

The last score was to gather at a  rakı table, to ensure any of us was left alone with their emotions, everyone shared how they were feeling and why they took part in the work, and how it had affected them. The conversation flowed–from our dead, our losses, and our relation to death. We played songs, Kübra sang, we cried, laughed, and chatted for hours. This gathering was also never documented—it exists only in our memories and personal phone photos, resisting representation. Afterwards, we checked in with each other regularly for days and weeks. Because what we agreed to do was, in a way, a confrontation of our vulnerability in the face of the systemic fungibility and potential futures that may include our own or our friends’ burial there.

A few days later, I returned to Kimsesiz with Gülbin, recording the cemetery’s structure: the numbered markers that erase individuality; the attempts of the loved ones and/or volunteers to personalize graves; and the ways life is erased by the system, yet remembered by a community. The project materialized as a video installation with a 55-minute film, Havuz [The Pool] that compels the viewer to count the marker numbers– numbers that signify not lives, but grave plots–alongside two channels of“an impossible ritual”: one showing the bottle-filling hands, and another with a red rose against the cemetery wall. And “No More Colours”, a redesigned inclusive rainbow flag with the colours replaced by the grave soils of Kimsesiz, confronts the necropolitics within queer lives and how it has been instrumentalised by Western politics.

I continue my research on the Cemeteries of Kimsesiz thanks to Gwaetler Grant 2025, by Gwaetler Stiftund and the project will open up to new dimensions and layers in the upcoming production, yet the entire project, Havuz —through both the production processes and final works— still encapsulate how I engage with queer art both in the context of Turkey and globally.

Melih Aydemir is an Istanbul-based artist, curator, and art worker whose practice explores identity fluidity, decolonization, labor, and digital communication within queer and SWANA communities. His work adopts an ‘artist as curator’ approach, creating artistic interventions within his exhibitions, often using text and time-based media.

How would you describe your work, and its engagement with queer art, particularly within the context of the Turkish political system?

My research primarily focuses on identity fluidity, decolonization, labor, and internet-based communication between queer and SWANA communities. I examine how terms like resilience, diversity, and identity are commodified within neoliberal systems, reducing complex and transformative practices to mere buzzwords.

When it comes to queer art, there are various ways to describe it, but I approach it as a conceptual framework rooted in queer’s disruptive power, regardless of the topic I’m addressing. My work in this context carries a certain abstraction and often evades the restrictive borders that the term “queer” might impose. I find it crucial to seek a ground beyond identity politics, which has been co-opted by Western-defined values and neoliberal structures. From a critical perspective, abstraction in this context can be read as a form of self-censorship. My personal interest has always been in coded queer narratives and the conceptual possibilities within a queer perspective—without disregarding the resistance it inherently carries.

In the context of Turkey’s political climate, where authoritarian pressure continues to rise, my latest curation, A Crack We Sprout Through, which took place during Pride Month, prioritized the creation of a public program. I saw this as an opportunity to diversify the Pride Month events and disrupt the authoritarian gaze,–similar, I suppose, to how the Pride parade was held on the Asian side to overcome Police presence around Taksim Square. A commercial gallery space, with its less direct narratives, conceptual approach, and generally apolitical stance, is less likely to be targeted. Given the decreasing number of available venues, it was a privilege to be able to use the gallery space and share it with my peers. We presented several events, ranging from a DJing workshop for queer youth to Nour AA’s poetry performance, which focuses on the experiences of a queer Palestinian. 

Last year and again in recent days, there have been deeply concerning incidents of censorship targeting queer art exhibitions—most notably the closure of the Trans Pride Week Istanbul archival exhibition at Depo. Additionally, the recent detention of individuals working in the cultural field who engage in queer activism, particularly from an intersectional standpoint, highlights the increasing repression in this context.

KOLİ Art Space is a non-profit art space in Kadıköy, Istanbul, focused on creativity, and inclusivity. It prioritizes safe spaces and has become an important hub for the queer art scene, providing a supportive place for artists to express themselves and share diverse stories. Through exhibitions, events, and collaborations, KOLİ amplifies underrepresented voices and builds a strong sense of community.

How would you describe your work, and its engagement with queer art, particularly within the context of the Turkish political system?

Elçin Acun: Koli Art Space is a duo art initiative. We initially had a physical space, but were unable to maintain it due to economic difficulties in Turkey and rising rents in Istanbul. We pursued various funding opportunities to alleviate financial difficulties, but the process did not yield sufficient results. Undoubtedly, our heavy workload also played a role in this outcome, as I am also an academic, which takes up a significant amount of my time.

I believe that the art scene in Turkey has distanced itself from political art due to the increasingly radical rhetoric of those in power. Personally, I continue working in the same fashion, but I struggle to find space for myself. It has become very difficult to see or exhibit works produced from a non-heteronormative perspective on body politics. In addition to all this, we are faced with a political discourse that is making society’s view toward LGBTi+ individuals increasingly hostile. This situation profoundly impacts queers–not only in arts, but across all aspects of life.

This art initiative has been a field that has held several layers of meaning for us from the very beginning, much like the word Koli itself. Besides its meaning in Lubunca, we have always considered its literal meaning: a portable structure, a box that can be folded and unfolded.

From the very beginning, we established this initiative with an activist purpose: to create a platform of solidarity where LGBTİ+ individuals could gain visibility in the art world and freely produce and exhibit their work, without concerns of censorship or the pressure of commercialization. In that sense, the past two and a half years have been fruitful for us. We held numerous events and had the opportunity to collaborate with many artists and curators–and that makes us very happy.

Editor: Mercan Baş
Prepared for publication by Bawer

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