Fire, everywhere
Fire, everywhere addresses the stigmatization and resilience of queer communities from past to present. Drawing on the HIV/AIDS crisis, the queer movement in Turkey, and the persecution of queer people under the Nazi regime, the project navigates transnational queer trauma and searches for empowerment through resistance, community, and ritual. The works hold space for grief while saluting resilience, moving between celebration and exhaustion, guilt and shame, resistance and the psychic toll of having to resist unceasingly. They ask how stigma might be embraced and re-appropriated in order to be dismantled.
Anatolian rituals, queer histories, and collective memory converging together, disrupting colonial Western notions that privilege rationality over ritual. Through this meeting, Fire, everywhere proposes other modes of making, with a Southwest Asian perspective grounding the practice.
The video work shows the traces of a fire ritual that acknowledges past violence and seeks ways to transform it. It starts by welcoming the ghosts of systematic exclusion in the space and remembers especially Hande Kader, Esra and Kaçariye: Three trans women activists from Istanbul who all died by being thrown or putting themselves in flames due to violence and oppression at different times.
The artist carried out the ritual with healing plants from Anatolia (sage, lavender, frankincense, olive leaves and esfand). In the ritual, Leman intends to send ease to those souls we lost, hold space to grieve for the loss and then call for protection and empowerment from the evil eye breaking plants for the evil eyes' not touching again the queer community.
The installation size and arrangement can change for each show according to the display size.
What is mine is also yours consists of large latex skins branded with an "X" (a symbol of the stigmatised queer body) and cared for with rose water throughout the exhibition period. Latex takes us back to the history of the HIV/AIDS crisis, its materiality seeming skin-like, yet artificial, reminds us of condoms and a safer sex culture. The latex skins dangle from the ceiling and metal pipes of the venue with metal chains and meat hooks as evidence of historical systematic violence. Yet the work doesn't focus on violence but on notions of care and community through the everyday ritual with rose water carried either by the artist, curators or exhibition assistants.
The ritual is performed during the exhibition opening times and never documented, though the audience who came to be in the exhibition space can take photos/ videos of the ritual. The texture of the latex skins changes everyday with the traces of rose water and the work never completes as it entails the ritual's being carried out every day each time that it is displayed. Which can also be read as each exhibition calls for a community to take care of the work.
Always ready to fight addresses queer resistance emerging through vulnerability while questioning the notions of defence, fight, restriction, self-protection, care, and support within the fight.
Leman performed the piece at 4 am for the camera to turn their body a site unpacking the notion of resistance and its impacts. The tiredness serves to point out both vulnerability and resilience. Always ready to fight serves as an entry point for the fight while relating to the effects of oppression and violence through the physical tiredness aspect of the artist's performing body.
The video work addresses the stigmatisation and abjectification of queerness and appropriates the stigma through the symbolic action of licking oneself's skin. The "licky" appropriation creates a gateway crossing the lines of queer joy, pleasure, and healing. The licking action comes from cats' instinct of licking themselves to bond, get rid of dirt and parasites, and soothe in stressful situations. Connecting with animality, Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu collects the licking from cats for a performative action opening towards connection, healing, joy and pleasure. In the one-hour-long performance, Leman licks themselves as if it heals their scars and wounds and establishes a saliva-and-skin-exchange-based contact with their own body. The tongue-skin contact introduces the notion of pleasure and joy beyond their heteronormative definitions.
Through the symbolic action turning into corporeal connection, while queer body reidentifies with strength, vulnerability and pleasure, the meaning of artistic work goes further than creating visual representations and refining with creating space to foster bodily connections beyond norms and to evoke imagination to the unimaginable.
What does resistance mean when the trajectories of oppression and violence don’t leave room for fighting against hegemonic powers or when the hegemonic powers seem to be insurmountable? What does it mean to resist when the fight is deemed to be impossible, or what kind of fights could we carry out when it is so? What it means to be resilient when the world constantly burns one out and leaves no room to breathe, no hope to hold on amidst the landscapes of stigmatisation and discrimination — how to rethink and manifest resilience not only as rebuilding a capacity to fight back but maybe building intimate kinships with the world within the fight? How to navigate in the fight queerly and as a queer within our societies absorbed in brutal violence and based on exclusion?
Fire, everywhere unpacks the complexity of resistance and resilience within queer lives. It turns the iconic symbol of the fight, the boxing glove, into research on violence and dynamics of empowerment. The performance questions how to navigate trajectories of oppression when hegemonic powers seem insurmountable for the marginalised. Through eight hours of mourning, anger, and transformation, Fire, everywhere explores ways to challenge and twist power dynamics, seeking expanding love for life amidst the constant fight.
