Performances

We Were Never Meant to Survive — a death-ritual pre-enactment among five women in a garden of stone and greenery

We Were Never Meant to Survive

Performance Film, Istanbul (2023)

  • Co-Director
  • Choreographer
  • Intimacy Coordinator

I designed a consent-based rehearsal framework for improvisational impulse exploration and choreographed the performance through simultaneous spoken guidance. This work was a pre-enactment of a death ritual between five women, exploring intimacy, care, and mortality. It included hyper-exposed material involving nudity and touch.

Time To Kiss A Stranger — a participant in a red sweater seated among an audience in a dimly lit participatory performance

Time To Kiss A Stranger

Participatory Performance, London (2024)

I designed encounters between audience members through a pre-recorded vocal score. The work explored momentary trust-building between strangers using carefully facilitated proximity. Participants interacted through non-verbal vocalizations, contributing to a shared soundscape that gradually transformed the atmosphere of the space.

Pneuma — a performer in deep purple surrounded by an intimate circle of participants at Tate Late

Pneuma

Participatory Performance, Tate Late x Royal College of Art, London (2023)

I invited audience members into one-to-one encounters through shared gaze and spoken oracle texts. The work explored the creation of temporary yet genuine encounters between strangers.

Head to Head — performers lying on the floor with heads emerging from paper while an audience watches in a dim gallery

Head to Head

PERFORMANCE, ISTANBUL (2022)

  • Performance Director
  • Choreographer
  • Intimacy Director

I choreographed this multi-body performance inspired by the re-enactment of a mythic upheaval state. Using embodied imagination and designed encounters as a guiding method, performers navigated themes of mortality and emotional vulnerability.

"Head to Head feels like something fleeting that I carry in a small bottle—a space that reminds me of togetherness, solidarity, and the possibility of human connection. The dreamlike quality of both the experience itself and the memory of it brings me back to where we first began."

Serap Kızıleroğlu

Curator

Performer, Head to Head, performance by Ülkü Çağlayan

Enacting Ourselves — two performers lean close together in a sunlit outdoor courtyard, one holding a wooden staff and wearing a stone mask pendant

Enacting Ourselves

Public Performance, Istanbul (2023)

I invited a group of six citizen performers into a three-hour walk without verbal communication and asked them to arrive wearing costume elements representing underexpressed aspects of themselves. The work explored relational presence, self-expression, and the subtle shifts that occur when previously hidden qualities become visible in public space. The performance unfolded through silence, public visibility and encounters with others.

Workshops

Social Dreaming Matrix

A facilitated group process that works with shared dreams as social material to explore collective themes, patterns and emerging questions within  communities.

Body as Erotic Site

A workshop exploring the erotic intelligence as a mode of connection between bodies giving attention to sensations, boundaries and interpersonal awareness through movement-based practices, consent frameworks and dialogue.

Body as Battlefield

A workshop on desire, resistance, and freedom of choice through embodied exercises, speculative scenarios and solidarity.