Join us for an electrifying evening filled with performances, screenings, readings, and discussions. The evening will feature a performance by Tuna Erdem, a reading by Kell w Farshéa, and videos from InXestuous Sisters and the Istanbul Queer Art Collective. We will also celebrate the launch of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds by Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift, with live readings and a dialogue with the authors.
A few tickets will be available at the door, but due to the venue’s limited capacity, booking is highly recommended. If there’s anyone you’d like to join who cannot afford the ticket, please contact us at minemariani@gmail.com.
Full programme and artist bios:
Performances: The FemmeDom and Her submissive
Performance by Tuna Erdem, 2024
Tuna Erdem is a queer artist and writer based in London. She is a founding member of the Istanbul Queer Art Collective (IQAC), which was established in 2012. Her artistic work encompasses a diverse range of forms including live art, collage and video art. However, writing, performing, and a strong connection to lived experience are common threads that run throughout her body of work. Repetition holds an important place in her art, whether it is in the form of avant-garde minimalism or the clichés of genre. Her art, especially in its non-performative incarnations, always has something of the epistolary about it. Tuna was recently awarded the DYCP grant by Arts Council England to develop her book project Letter Realness, which is a hybrid between life writing and art writing that she worked on during her residency at Cove Park over the summer and is currently finalising. The FemmeDom and Her submissive is a performance that includes a performative reading from this project, which focuses on her experiences in the realm of BDSM, and how this shapes her art practice.
See The Joy
Poetry written and performed by Kell w Farshéa
Kell w Farshéa (they) is a pansexual intersex nonbinary fem. They have been an anarchist for 44 years. From Orgreave to Section 28, radical trade unionism to the Camberwell Squatted Centre, the Poll Tax to Trans Liberation – they have been involved in many anarchist and anti-authoritarian activisms for over four decades.They were press officer for ACT UP London (89-92), co-founded the UK Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in 1990, founded the Spanner campaign (1992-1997), SMPride Marches (1992-2003), The Spanner Trust (1996- ), and were co-founder of Institute of SM Studies in 2019. They live in London with a companion animal.
Video screenings:
Mother of...
Video, 10'01'', 2021
Istanbul Queer Art Collective
Istanbul Queer Art Collective (IQAC) is an artist duo, founded by Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergul in 2012, based in London. IQAC was formed to engage in live art with a view that the documentation of performance is an art form in itself, which has led them towards video art, sound art, and archival installation. They use their own performance documentation as "found footage" to create experimental video art and, in return, use their videos as an aspect of multimedia performances. Their latest film How to Politicise Fluxus (2024) was shortlisted for the Fluxus Museum Prize. Their videos have been exhibited in places like ICA, Copeland Gallery, Ugly Duck, and Badischer Kunstverein. Mother of... revolves around, A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft in Newington Green, which was called “the most polarising artwork of 2020” by the Guardian.
Enchanted by the Failings that Nature Gave the Female Heart Video of guerrilla performance (June 2021), 13.13min by InXestuous Sisters
InXestuous Sisters (IXS) is a collaborative duo between Niya B and Giulia C. Together, they explore their transfeminist sisterhood and lesbian lust, indulging in black cherry jam, techno-baroque, pink-coloured garments, laces, whips, and red lipstick. When they grow up, they would like to be artists, but for the time being, they are just ‘unapologetically femme.’ IXS have been presenting short or durational work in domestic milieus, night clubs, car parks, online events, and art galleries, including Riposte (London), Queer Art(ists) Now (Archive Gallery, London), @Disturbance (Ugly Duck, London), the 2021 Every Woman Biennial (London), and at BuzzCut Festival (Tramway, Glasgow). Enchanted by the Failings that Nature Gave the Female Heart is a video based on a series of public interventions commissioned by the Galatea project, as part of the 2021 Every Woman Biennial (London). Commissioned by Queer Art Projects for Every Woman Biennial in partnership with The Koppel Project.
Launch of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds
By Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift, with live readings and a dialogue with the authors With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (2024), co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine, and their article They would plant the rose garden themselves: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’ was recently published in Social Text. Mijke van der Drift works on transfeminist and anti-imperial ethics through philosophies of movement, collective action, and counter-cultural production. This work takes the form of writings, performances, and sound pieces, often by way of interdisciplinary collaborations.
Mijke is Tutor (Research) at the Royal College of Art, London, and co-chair of its Union branch. Mijke is a founding member of the arts collective Red Forest. Community organizing is a fundamental part of Mijke’s life.Dr. Nat Raha is a poet and activist-scholar. Her books of poetry include apparitions (nines) (2024) and of sirens, body & faultlines (2018). Nat has been involved in LGBTQ+ collective organizing in Edinburgh, London, and beyond for over a decade. With Mijke van der Drift, Nat is co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (2024), co-editor of Radical Transfeminism zine, and their article ‘“They would plant the rose garden themselves”: Femmeness, Complicity, Solidarity’ was recently published in Social Text.
Nat’s creative and critical writing appears in The Brooklyn Rail, Queer Print in Europe, Transgender Marxism, Third Text (‘Imagining Queer Europe then and now’), and South Atlantic Quarterly. She is a Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies at the Glasgow School of Art.
Femme Attack
Co-organised by Mine Kaplangı and participating artists.