Passed Down, Taken Back
Berke Eren Gün
Antwerp,Belgium
About
Rooted in sculpture and expanded through my Master’s research, my multidisciplinary practice moves across installation, video, performance, and drawing. As a non-binary and gender-fluid artist, I explore the fragility of the body, identity, and systemic invisibility, focusing particularly on the socio-political pressures faced by LGBTQ+ individuals in Turkey. Working through archival and autoethnographic methods, I combine personal memory with collective experiences to investigate themes of exclusion, protection, and belonging. My work transforms these narratives into immersive environments that confront both the vulnerability and resilience of the human form.
Project
The artist appears in drag, making erişte by hand at a floor table. Erişte is a hand-rolled pasta, a domestic knowledge passed down through the hands of women across generations of Turkish households. At the end of the performance, the pasta is packaged and given to the audience to take home. The care becomes an object. The performance ends not on stage but in someone else’s kitchen. Appearing in drag is not incidental: in Turkey, where anti-LGBT hostility makes queer visibility dangerous, this performance could not exist. As a non-binary person, drag is not a costume but a way of doing what was passed down, as who you actually are, in a body and a place that finally allows it.