Göksu Kunak has created the performance Petrol especially for the opening, investigating the economic and socio-cultural effects of the oil politics in Turkey in the 80s and 90s. A pop singer interrogates and is interrogated at the same time. The starting point for this work is famous singer Ajda Pekkan‘s love song to oil of the same name, which represented Turkey at the 1980 Eurovision Song Contest. The former Turkish Prime Minister (1983-1989) and President (1989-1993) Turgut Özal – a prominent figure during the Gulf War - and his wife Semra Özal find their way into Kunak’s investigation, in addition to pop and arabesk music videos.

After the performance, Istanbul Ghetto Club combines the sounds of modular synthesizers and traditional Anatolian instruments into a concert. They call the result »Anatolian Acid«, a pan-genre sound created in the widely respected Berlin underground and avant garde scene. While Istanbul Ghetto Club experiments with performance and new media art, they embody an intersection between three binaries: East and West, underground and mainstream, tradition and zeitgeist.

The after-party features sets by DJs Maque Pereyra and Helina.
 

 THE REOPENING 

Studio Я’s FЯEMDE POESIE? series stages works of poetry by authors, who each tell, in their own way, of being foreign and trying to be heard in mainstream society. The series is launching this season with the following volumes of poetry: Yahya Hassan by Yahya Hassan, Fremd by Michel Friedman and To Be In A Time Of War by Etel Adnan. Works from today and the recent past join together into a unique »symphony of contemporary poetry.« In all of their differences, all works share a »foreignness at home,« which expresses itself as an eloquent political accusation and formulates a longing for an understanding of belonging.

Poetry belongs on stage. It finds a language for that which cannot be translated. Poems come from the spoken tradition, contain oral history. These texts must be intoned, heard, experienced, lived, they must take place to unfurl the emotionality written into them. These stagings are workshop-style. They focus on the performativity of the poems and the political voices of their authors as they examine the question of being foreign in one’s own homeland. 

In the immersive-multimedia performance of poems by Yahya Hassan, which will be opening the series on 24/January 2024, we dive into his blunt reckoning with his lived reality as a stateless Palestinian with a Danish passport. Hassan‘s poetic language is angry, radical and, at the same time, just as full of violence as it is in search of tenderness. 


 To the Performance 

FЯEMDE POESIE? is funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.