As a queer, anti-fascist performance artist from Turkey, Kunak’s works reflect on the auto-censorship which accompanies them and their artmaking. Growing up amid political suppression and now living in Berlin, their works deal with the performative signifiers of contemporary lifestyles. Kunak studies the way that the patriarchy injects banality as an everyday phenomenon. Normative patriarchal structures are broken down and given a makeover to inspire new realities that expose the problems of the old, for example by experimenting with kuir camouflage. One of Kunak’s key influences is Arabesk culture, urban development in Turkey, the resultant suppression of minorities and the residual self-censorship it imparts on the suppressed. Arabesk is a genre of music that emerged in Turkey towards the end of the 1960s and became popular among rural migrants. Mixing Turkish classical (Türk Sanat Müziği) and folk with Egyptian and Western elements it came to symbolise the entire migrant culture that inspired it. Arabesk outlines the relationship between Turkish modernity and Westernisation and its many contradictions and absurdities. Kunak’s works form a response to the capitalist modernisation process and its tension with Orientalism and Self-Orientalisation – the perception of ‘Eastern’ and how they see themselves through this construction. Kunak is helping define Turkish Eastern-futurism by combining speculation and science-fiction, history and fantasy into new methodologies for artmaking.

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