Sultan Çoban

Visual artist, performer – Zurich, Switzerland
Participant International Forum 2022

Sultan Çoban is a visual artist and performer. She holds a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts from Zurich University of the Arts. She is Kurdish born and currently lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland. Her work explores issues of language, the complexity of its relation to the body and being in between Eastern and Western cultures. She raises questions about the space of the past in the present moment, obscuring the binary between absence and presence. Her work is characterised by a form-conscious exploration of language and the ways in which cultural identity is staged and performed. Some of her movement, sound and space projects include „Second Solo Show“, “gazino (*pain and their friends)” where she uses Arabesque-Music to re-present and re-create a certain period in time and to pose the question of translation and transferability of staged emotions between different linguistic and cultural contexts and performed identity. Her important artistic encounters were working with choreographer and director Trajal Harrell as a performer on „Monkey off My Back or the Cat’s Meow” and together with Dramaturg Bendix Fesefeldt on her stage work „Second Solo Show“ as performers and with Director Leonie Böhm as assistant director at Schauspielhaus Zurich. Her works value freedom, intimacy and vulnerability. Her films, performances and installations have been presented at several exhibitions, galleries, off-spaces, performance- and film festivals.