Artist Tayranoğlu Onur

Queer Autonomous Zone, Along the Pink-line in between Finland and Turkey

Taiteellinen työ / siihen pohjautuva työ | Kaksivuotinen

As my mandatory military service in Turkey approaches, I aim to get the "Pink-Bill," an official exemption based on the diagnosis of my queerness, deemed as "Psychosexual Disorder" by the Turkish Armed Forces. This diagnosis marks my body as incompetent for the military, but prompts me to wonder if the term "disorder" signifies a radical potential? Can queerness disrupt not only the military order but also the way nationalism is structured and promoted, potentially ushering in a queer upheaval? To explore this question, I am embarking a two-year long experiment; establishing a fictional queer autonomous zone at the pink-line, a rhetorical border that divides Finland and Turkey. The pink-line is introduced as a concept by South African journalist Mark Gevisser to analyse the division of the world based on its "queerfriendliness," carrying the legacies of racism and colonialism. The pink-line functions as an apparatus to justify orientalist and colonial perspectives on one side, while supporting the victim rhetoric of populism on the other, ultimately enabling polarizing nationalist views on both. During the project, I will be speculating about this fictional land through public interventions, performances, exhibitions and performative gatherings with the queer communities of these countries that I aim to bridge through artistic collaborations. I will deepen the speculations with the intersecting theories of queer and post-colonial studies as well as critical studies in visual culture and performance. I organize this quest in three consecutive phases: "Gathering" during which I will be working towards building a community for the Queer Autonomous Zone; "Tactics for Liberation" in which I will seek tactics for gaining agency as queer communities in the debates of far-right nationalism through crticial speculations, and "Legacy" in which I will make a docu-fictional short film based on this speculative land in collaboration with visual artist Melisa Saydı (TR).