All photos by Uygar Önder Yılmaz and Erdem Akkaya
My burden is my soulmate
Live performance and video and sound installation
6 hours
2021 – 2022
Funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media Germany and SAHA Association.
Supported by NEUSTART KULTUR, BBK, Performistanbul, Ornamenta2024, Schwules Museum, Versus Art Project, DEPO Istanbul.
Starting with a research on resistant and tender images of the marginalized body, My burden is my soulmate is about how to address Queer grief, anger and compassion when one is an incessant target of hate and disgust.
By engaging with “tableaux vivant” corporeality but extending the “tableau”s timescale to six hours, My burden is my soulmate delves into physical and emotional limits, boundaries and the potential of the Queer body throughout the lines of vulnerability and strength.
Within references of one of the first public manifestations of queer movement as hunger strike held mainly by trans women against police repression and violence in 1987 through the roses and Nazi times Queer massacre through the color pink, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu appropriates the Pietà of Michelangelo in Compassion, replaces raising fist as symbol of revolutionary movements with raising roses in Anger and takes the shape of Queer corpse in site of murders in Grief in order to create a monumental performance trilogy engaging in Queer resilience and vulnerability.
Leman invites the audience to a journey on the body tracing the violence, confinement and restriction. Through 6 hour-long performances, the body reveals itself within a shift between different states of stillness, almost-stillness and not-possible-stillness and becomes a site of grief, fragility and resistance.
When My burden is my soulmate takes place as a performance, Grief and Anger are shown as a two channel video installation and Compassion is performed live. If not performed live, three videos generate a multimedia installation and form My burden is my soulmate.
For the Schwules Museum live performance Leman collaborated with Anthony Hüseyin as live.
Schwules Museum, Berlin, 2021, with Anthony Hüseyin
For Ornamenta24 at Stadtmuseum Pforzheim Leman collaborated with Fırat Yıldız from Pforzheim for a pre-recorded sound piece.
Photo by Karolina Sobel
Ornamenta24 pre-exhibitions at Stadtmuseum Pforzheim, curated by Jules van Den Langenberg, Willem Schenk, Katharina Wahl, 2022
Video-installation view at bi’bak Berlin, 2022
