Berlin-based artist Göksu Kunak works across performance, choreography, and theory, focusing on how political histories register in bodies, language, and systems of movement. Drawing on Arabesk music, science fiction, Fluxus strategies, and their own experience of migration, Kunak examines how mobility is structured, distributed, and restricted.

Their latest work, INNOCENCE, takes the Susurluk scandal as its point of departure. The 1996 car crash exposed connections between politicians, police, and organized crime in Turkey. Kunak approaches this event as a structural model. The accident reveals how power operates and how it becomes visible under pressure. Presented at Sophiensäle, INNOCENCE unfolds as a staged progression from order to disruption. Lecture, choreography, and text operate in parallel. An ensemble moves through tightly structured sequences before the composition loosens and expands. Movement is treated as a political condition, shaped by systems that determine who can move, how, and under which circumstances. The work traces these dynamics across different contexts, from guest worker routes between Germany and Turkey to current debates on migration, censorship, and state violence.

We spoke with Kunak about impact as a method, the relation between tension and release, and the role of language in constructing alternative forms of resistance.

Vakuum: Your INNOCENCE piece layers Turkey’s Susurluk scandal with imperial crash narratives—how does performing it at Sophiensäle amid Berlin’s current debates on migration and censorship amplify its urgency for local audiences?

Göksu Kunak: The entanglement between Germany, cars, and Turkey is not new especially considering the German car lobbyism as an imperialist force. There is a brilliant film from the 1970s, Mercedes Mon Amour, which tells the tragicomic story of a guest worker driving from Munich to his small village in Turkey in his brand-new yellow Mercedes to attend a funeral. Many Turkish films revolve around these journeys between Germany and Turkey. As an immigrant myself, I inevitably started thinking about the idea of the journey—migration, movement, and, in the worst cases, forced displacement. In a way, the monuments of  urban life are cars. They promise mobility and freedom, but they also reveal the political and economic structures that shape who can move and who cannot. People arrive or escape with them. Coming from Central Anatolia, censorship and migration were already central concerns in my work. At first they appeared quite directly, but over time through artistic filtering, they became more subtle, more suggestive. I left Turkey because of politics, and self-censorship became something I began to explore as an artistic methodology: how to say something without actually saying it.

Performing INNOCENCE in Berlin brings these layers into a different context. The Susurluk scandal exposed hidden alliances between the state, crime, and power; today, Berlin is also a place where questions of migration, censorship, and political responsibility are intensely debated. Presenting the piece at Sophiensäle allows these histories to echo each other, revealing how systems of power, and the crashes they produce, are never confined to one country.

V: Your works blend Fluxus, storytelling, comedy, and dance to probe “crashed” bodies and simulacra; what somatic or choreographic tools did you develop specifically for INNOCENCE’s ensemble? 

GK: The dichotomy of tension and release was very prominent in the making of the piece. Think of the moment just before a crash—whether a car crash or accidentally hitting your body against something. There is an extreme stretch of tension, followed by the sudden release that comes with the impact. What fascinates me is how that moment alters our perception of time. A similar dynamic structures the piece itself. At first everything is ordered and controlled, but in the second part—when we move to the courtyard—that structure collapses and the atmosphere becomes more chaotic and relaxed. Various parts of the performance—such as the lecture performance text and the dance solo—are built around these concepts. The members of the ensemble—Bilgesu Akyürek, Felix Beer, Buğra Büyüksimşek, Chima Okerenkwo, and Leo Luchini—all also have backgrounds in theory, which makes the process easier, since we are able to discuss these abstract ideas together.

V: How has your Berlin residency shaped queer tactics like bodybuilding as “crashed” resistance or acid-attack motifs from BERGEN, especially after anti-fascist turns in your post-2024 works? 

GK: I don’t see bodybuilding as “crashed resistance,” but rather as a kind of simulacrum—a power that creates something completely different from the original body, exceeding its natural capacities. I’m fascinated by the idea that muscles need to be “crashed” in order to grow. Bergen’s story—the Turkish Arabesk singer whose husband threw nitric acid on her face and later murdered her—is a tragic one. Unfortunately, violence against women and LGBTQI people has long been a major problem in Turkey. Even last week there were protests about this.

To answer your question directly: 2024 did not really change my work. I have already been dealing with imperialist and colonialist discourses and the kinds of violence they produce. I think the shift happened more for Europeans who had not fully realized the world we were already living in. In my text Drone Barbie (2018) and later in the performance and installation PETROL (2021), I was already addressing the weapons industry and the history of Western hegemony in the Middle East/South West Asia driven by oil. The Gulf War happened… There was also this idea of a “safe Europe,” which I believed in too—that’s why I came here. But these atrocities were always happening; they have simply become more intense and more visible. Of course I’m deeply worried and angry about the genocides taking place around the world. As the author and journalist Ece Temelkuran said in an interview, we are now mourning the future. Or, to recall Judith Butler’s question: whose lives are considered worth grieving in this world? I continue working on my pieces with these concerns in mind.

V: Influenced by Arabesk’s commodification and self-Orientalism, how do you weave non-Western dramaturgies and sci-fi into performances that critique capitalist modernization from Berlin?

GK: INNOCENCE is actually the first piece where I worked with what could be called a Western dramaturgy, or perhaps something trying to be Western, much like Turkey itself. The performance begins with a very ordered, frontal structure. At some point though, a metaphorical crash happens: everything collapses and transforms into something closer to a happening—a chaotic world somewhere between Mad Max and A Clockwork Orange.

V: As a Turkish queer artist navigating auto-censorship in Turkey and diaspora life, what role does multilingual syntax play in imagining Eastern futurism against fascist suppression?

GK: Language and self-censorship are tactics I partly borrow from science fiction. I’m interested in the relationship between hegemonic languages and creole forms of resistance. In Samuel Delany’s novel Nova, the characters live in a dystopian but functioning world. There are no countries anymore and everyone speaks the same language. Yet, for example, a Turkish character still speaks with Turkish syntax. That’s where I got the idea of playing with syntax while keeping the language English, as if the skeleton of another language surfaces beneath the muscles.

* In the conversation, movement emerges as something regulated rather than freely available. It is produced within systems that define access, direction and limitation. The crash marks the point at which these systems become visible. In INNOCENCE, impact is used as an analytical tool. It exposes how structures operate and how quickly they break down under pressure. What becomes clear is that mobility is never neutral. It is tied to power, and to the conditions under which it can be granted or denied.