İBNE

2020 Public Intervention
Close frontal view of İBNE installed high on an ochre building façade. A rectangular piece of turquoise-blue fabric patterned with small pink roses is stretched horizontally across the wall. Hundreds of dark-blue evil-eye beads stitched onto the fabric form the word “İBNE” in large capital letters, with additional individual and clustered beads scattered around the letters. Dark metal lettering from the existing façade artwork remains visible above, below and around the fabric.
Wide street view of an ochre building façade in Kreuzberg. İBNE appears high on the wall as a small turquoise-blue rectangle within a much larger field of dark metal Turkish suffixes distributed across the façade. Below the intervention, pedestrians, people seated outside, bicycles, shopfronts and street furniture occupy the street, while neighbouring buildings extend along both sides of the view.
Upward-looking view of İBNE installed directly among the dark metal Turkish suffixes on the ochre façade. The turquoise-blue fabric, patterned with small pink roses, stretches horizontally across the wall between windows and covers part of the existing metal lettering. Hundreds of dark-blue evil-eye beads form the large capital letters “İBNE,” with additional beads scattered across the fabric. Metal suffixes remain visible immediately above, below and beside the intervention.
Photography: Besire Paralık, Derin Cankaya

“İbne” is a Turkish slur broadly comparable to “faggot” in English. Derived from the Arabic word ibn, meaning “son,” the term historically came to be used derogatorily in relation to male homosexuality and, in contemporary Turkish, is used more broadly as an insult against queer people. At the same time, Turkish-speaking queer communities have actively reclaimed ibne, transforming a word used to stigmatize and humiliate into a form of self-identification, solidarity, and resistance. It can frequently be heard in Pride slogans and across LGBTI+ activism in Turkey.

This strategy of reappropriation resonates with, without being equivalent to, the reclamation of the word queer by English-speaking LGBTI+ communities. Particularly through queer activism around the HIV/AIDS crisis and resistance to the homophobia, stigma, and institutional abandonment surrounding it, a term historically used as an insult was increasingly claimed as a self-designation and political position. In different linguistic and historical circumstances, the reclamation of ibne similarly turns the language of injury back upon the structures that produce it.

İBNE consists of the word ibne stitched onto floral fabric using approximately 700 blue evil-eye beads. Common across Turkey and many other regions, the eye-shaped glass bead is used as an amulet against the evil eye. Bringing this protective object together with a reclaimed slur, the work was conceived as a greeting to and an expression of appreciation for the Turkish-speaking queer community in Kreuzberg, Berlin.

Kreuzberg has been home to substantial Turkish-speaking migrant communities since the 1960s and continues to hold very different communities, political positions, and relationships to queerness alongside one another. Within this context, ibne can circulate simultaneously as a derogatory term directed against queer people and as a word reclaimed and celebrated by queer communities themselves.

İBNE was installed on the façade that carries Ayşe Erkmen’s public artwork Am Haus. Erkmen’s work uses variants of the Turkish suffixes -miş/-mış/-muş/-müş, grammatical forms that can indicate knowledge acquired indirectly or through hearsay. In everyday speech, this mode can also evoke the circulation of stories about others—what has supposedly happened, what someone has allegedly done, what has been said behind someone’s back. By placing İBNE within Erkmen’s field of suffixes, the intervention connects this linguistic structure of hearsay with gossip about queerness and with the ways such speech can be used to target, expose, and humiliate LGBTI+ people.

Within this specific site, İBNE also operates as a gesture of gratitude and a totemic protector for Turkish-speaking queer people who have built spaces in and around Kreuzberg, including spaces for non-Western LGBTI+ communities. The protective function associated with the evil-eye beads sits alongside the reclaimed insult: a word intended to injure is enlarged, made public, and carried by hundreds of protective eyes.

The intervention had to be removed the day after it was installed. Darıcıoğlu subsequently wrote an announcement text explaining the work’s intentions, references, and encounter with the public. The text was linked to a QR code that was distributed across the streets of Berlin in November 2020, extending the intervention beyond its brief physical presence on the façade. The text linked to the QR code can be read here.

Screenshot of a vertically formatted announcement for İBNE on a pale blue background. German, English and Turkish headings introduce the public intervention and name Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu. Across the lower half, “İBNE” appears in very large capital letters formed from densely arranged pink roses and green leaves, while faint line drawings of evil-eye beads are scattered across the background.
Click the image to read the text
Design by Ece Eldek
Credits
İBNE, by Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, public intervention, 2020
Stitching on fabric with evil eye beads, 75 × 100 cm
Kottbuser Tor, Kreuzberg, Berlin
Installation assistant: Serra
Acknowledgements: Hasan Aksaygın, Jean Marie Engler, Yener Bayramoğlu
Public Intervention Diaspora Non-Western Queerness Site-specific Queer Reappropriation Public Space Collective Memory
← RETURN TO ALL WORKS