caner teker: KIRKPINAR

In KIRKPINAR, caner teker appropriates movements from traditional Turkish oil wrestling, opening new queer spaces where the power dynamics of history, masculinity, vulnerability, and intimacy can be investigated.

Glistening bronze through time, or bright cis-white, fabulous muscles have always taken our breath away. Always inadequate in the shadow of their brilliance, the question isn’t so much what they do to us, but why we keep staring. Fixated, caner teker inserts themself into the nexus of desire, humiliation, and violence otherwise known as masculinity. A self-appointed impostor, their fraudulence at best confounds, at worst conceals, the binary distinctions between what is and isn’t, European or Turkish, male or female, gay or straight: queer, as the kids these days call it.

Based on the movements of traditional Turkish oil wrestling or Yağlı Güreş, KIRKPINAR is both a performance and an ongoing research project that restages ostensible acts of aggression not only as gestures of intimacy, but also as a ritualistic form of work. In a makeshift wrestling ring, caner teker and Élie Autin softly sift their way through a series of predetermined postures at a tempo determined by their muscular endurance. Unrelenting, they slowly build a tension that knows no climax.

But it’s hardly a secret that even the most violent sports harbour moments of physical intimacy and tiresome labor, least of all for sportsmen. Far from revealing what’s hidden in plain sight, KIRKPINAR is perhaps better seen as a projection of the men we should prefer to see: all tender touches and reciprocal support. More echo chamber than microscope, it confronts us with the contradictions and silences of our own desire. Again and in other words, it asks us to ask ourselves why we keep staring.

Curated by Lewon Heublein