The Pool
Kimsesiz means those who have no one in Turkish. The cemetery of Kimsesiz within the Kilyos Cemetery, Istanbul cradles the unclaimed and nameless dead: the homeless, the victims of honour crimes and femicides, the premature babies, refugees, queer and especially trans people, and Kurdish people who vanished due to state violence. Here, they bury people whose bodies are left unclaimed, not returned to their kin by the state, or unable to be repatriated due to war or intersecting difficulties. Each grave, marked only by a number, starkly symbolises the politics of abandonment by the state and society. The cemetery workers call this place havuz [the pool], a place where all the singularities and lives are erased, sometimes two bodies are buried on top of each other in a single grave with a concrete partition between them.
The film The Pool [Havuz] conveys structures that erase lives and all differences, and the homages made with stones and flowers by possible loved ones or volunteers. Accompanying two-channel video installation an impossible ritual focuses on the agonising impossibility of completing a mourning ritual in this cemetery. Leman, along with their comrades Kübra Uzun and Onur Tayranoğlu, and the production team, visits this forsaken place, bearing witness to the existence of the departed and the dehumanising practices inflicted upon them with the intention to carry an impossible ritual to grieve.
No more colors critically examines the positioning of current queer politics defined by Western standards and exposes how ‘queer safety’ has been co-opted into a tool for state manipulation. Leman questions the rainbow flag, a global symbol appropriated by hegemonic power, revealing how it functions as a polarizing object. This boundary object plays a central role in defining the construction of Europeanness coded as progressive and differentiates it from the others.
While the flag’s colours, rooted in the universal acceptance of love in all forms, are intended to symbolise unity, they have been weaponized to justify destruction and polarise society. Leman replaces the flag’s vibrant hues with soil, urging us to remember its historical necropolitics and to reconsider its contemporary interpretation. The connection between death and queerness, particularly for trans lives, is a direct consequence of a necropolitical order that views these lives as disposable as a strategy of social subjugation and institutional maintenance. This disposability aims to reinforce social binaries and heteronormativity by punishing deviations through exclusion and violence.
