Prologue: Endless Rehearsal

2025 Performance
Outdoors beside parked cars, the performer crouches over a small white bowl on the pavement, holding a smoking bundle of dried herbs above it. They wear black thigh-high boots and minimal clothing, with long pale hair falling forward and tattoos covering one shoulder and arm.
A small pile of blue-and-white matchboxes sits on the grey gallery floor in the foreground, with a glass hourglass containing pale yellow sand standing farther behind.
The performer crouches low on the gallery floor facing a seated audience, holding a lit match upright in one hand. Open matchboxes, loose wooden matches and an hourglass are scattered across the floor between them and the audience.
Seen from behind, the performer sits wide-legged on the grey floor wearing white briefs and tall black boots, their bare tattooed back facing the camera. They sit directly over a long strip of printed text laid out on the floor, with loose matches scattered around them.
Top-down view of the performer seated across a long strip of printed text on the floor, wearing white briefs and black thigh-high boots. Their tattooed back is bare as they lean forward holding a matchbox and work among scattered matches and small boxes.
The performer kneels low on the grey floor in white briefs and tall black boots, leaning their upper body toward a large bright red quilt gathered into a mound in front of them. Matchboxes and loose wooden matches are scattered across the surrounding floor.
Kneeling on the floor in white briefs and tall black boots, the performer lifts the large bright red quilt high above their head and upper body. Their torso arches upward beneath the quilt while matchboxes and loose matches remain scattered around them.
The performer lies on their back across the grey floor beside the bright red quilt, one leg bent and the other extended in a tall black boot. Matchboxes and loose wooden matches surround their body; one arm reaches outward while the other hand is raised near their face.
Close overhead view of the performer lying inside the thick bright red quilt, their tattooed arms folded across their bare chest and one hand resting over the other. Their eyes are closed and pale hair spreads across the quilt.
Audience members sit closely together on the gallery floor facing a large projected video. On screen, two people appear in separate overlapping images, including a light-haired person in the foreground and a dark-haired person seated behind. The backs of several viewers fill the lower part of the photograph.
Prologue: Endless Rehearsal, Pickle Bar, Berlin, 2025. Photography: Berk Akkaya.

Prologue: Endless Rehearsal unfolds between the lines of grief and anger, questioning the position and practice of the migrant queer artist under contemporary European politics, where the ideals of social democracy have become unconvincing, and the rise of xenophobic far-right ideologies, queerphobia, censorship, and systemic oppression shapes daily reality.

Drawing inspiration from the notion of time of British-born Australian-Turkish Cypriot artist Mutlu Çerkez, the work challenges dominant temporalities that govern visibility, survival, and artistic production. In this prologue, time does not progress linearly; it loops, stutters, rehearses. The performance becomes an act of returning, undoing, and redoing: a rehearsal without end.

What does it mean to rehearse endlessly under regimes that demand clarity, identity, and productivity? What becomes possible when we resist closure, finality, and resolution? Prologue: Endless Rehearsal proposes rehearsal as a form of resistance, a queer temporality of building a life beyond survival, a mourning-in-motion.

Seen from above, the performer lies curled on a grey floor inside a thick bright red quilt, with only their bare legs and tall black boots emerging. Matchboxes and scattered wooden matches lie nearby.
Photography: Mara Kirschberg
Presentations
When One of Us Remembers Who We Really Are, All of Us Remember, with Sarah Martinus, book launch of Auditions for An Unwritten Opera, publication on the work of Mutlu Çerkez (1964–2005) from Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, curated by Misal Adnan Yıldız, Pickle Bar, Berlin, DE, 2025
Credits
Prologue: Endless Rehearsal, by Leman Sevda Darıcıoğlu, performance, 2 hours, 2025
Featuring Boysan Yakar in the video Raskol's Axe by iyisaatteolsunlar, 2013
Acknowledgement: Mara Kirschberg
Performance Chronopolitics Migration Diaspora Non-Western Queerness Resistance Ritual Rehearsal as Method Opacity Art History References Yorgan
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