Intimate Letters: A Multimedia Reading of Queer Autofiction
This performance is the product of a year-long queer autofiction writing group of 3 migrant queers from South West Asia who appreciate the genre of autofiction for its ability to foreground lived experience with disregard to generic binaries like fiction and autobiography, storytelling and testament, and the infamous high and low culture. The performance consists of a reading of texts written in letter form, weaving pop culture with deep trauma in an experimental fashion. The reading will be accompanied by a soundscape and video created by Seda Ergul.
Tuna Erdem is an artist, creative producer and writer based in London. She has been a founding member of the Istanbul Queer Art Collective since 2012 and the co-director of Queer Art Projects since 2017. She holds an MA in Film and Art Theory from the University of Kent and a PhD in Film, TV, and Theatre from Reading University. A bit of a jack-of-all-trades, she has dabbled in various fields, including journalism, film criticism, performance, writing, curation, production and lecturing on a wild variety of subjects. Similarly, her artistic work encompasses a diverse range of forms, from performance and video art, to collage and sound art. However, writing, performing, and a strong connection to lived experience are common threads that run throughout her body of work.
Seda Ergul is an artist, curator and producer based in London. She is a founding member of Istanbul Queer Art Collective since 2012. Her art ranges from performance to video and sound art. She is also a creative producer and curator at Queer Art Projects a company that organises art projects like exhibitions, performances, screenings, talks and workshops, commissioning new work from queer artists on cutting edge contemporary issues.
Dr Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle Eastern Literature at Cambridge University. Hana is a writer, translator and scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left. Her current writing and research examine how colonialism and decolonization have shaped literary forms and cultural practices. This includes the formation of anticolonial literatures, cultural journals, organizations and forums, and the role these have played within histories and ongoing processes of decolonization. Her upcoming book Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature, Translation and Magazines (EUP 2024) and the accompanying literary collection A Literature for All Our Peoples: A Palestinian-Jewish reader, reconstructs a history of anticolonial Palestinian and Jewish literary collaborations, from the heyday of decolonization in the 1950s to the present day. Hana holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bard College. Their creative practice examines questions of political violence, queer culture and internationalism. Recent publications include essays in Journal of Levantine Studies, Modernism/modernity, Africa is A Country and an upcoming special issue on Revolutionary Papers for Radical History Review.