Part of ProtoZone19: Ruptures \ Reliances, 23.05.2025-03.08.2025

tangerine

on 13th of June 2025 at 20:30-21:30

The performative installation tangerine deals with the so-called Susurluk car crash of 1996, which had a lasting impact on society and politics in Turkey as it revealed the existence of a triangular network of organized crime, politics, and state.

While passing through various stations in the room, Kunak revisits the imagery that this event has generated, ranging from newspaper reports to a soap opera or film. These intermingle with abstract notions of the idea of innocence in relation to loss, grief, heartbreak and psychosis.

Supported by ifa – Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen

Göksu Kunak (Ankara, 1985) is an artist, researcher and writer based in Berlin. Göksu’s interest lies in especially chronopolitics and hybrid texts that deal with the performative lingo(s) of contemporary lifestyles as well as non-Western/unorthodox dramaturgies. As a non-native English writer, their texts play with multilingualism and syntax. Influenced by Arabesk culture and late modernities, Göksu imagines new situations out of real encounters that point out the problematics of hetero-patriarchal structures. Orientalism, self-Orientalization (the perception of the ‘Eastern’, and how the Eastern sees themselves through this construction), as well as camouflage, self-censorship and science fiction are other interests of Göksu. Recently Göksu has been working on score-based performances and installations that focus on simulacrum and muscle as an object, body-as-sculpture.

In 2025, Göksu received the Akademie der Künste Kunstpreis (The Berlin Prize for Art) and previously was nominated for the Dieter-Ruckhaberle-Förderpreis. They were also one of the winners of the Live Works Prize Vol. 8 at Centrale Fies with their piece Cabaret Portrait: Döner Blackout III. In 2023 funded by Haupstadtkulturfonds and Freischwimmen Platform, they performed Ajaib Mahluqat (Acayip Mahlukat) co-produced by Sophiensaele Theater Berlin. Göksu exhibited their solo exhibitions Dhikr at Number1MainRoad Berlin and Bygone Innocence at Pilevneli Gallery Istanbul, both curated by Léon Kruijswijk.