Verem. Lovesick

While in English or German one becomes nonspecifically lovesick, in the Turkish language the suffering lover gets verem, which translates overwhelmingly specific as: tuberculosis. Inspired by and in dialogue with Pallavi Paul’s current exhibition How Love Moves that traces the cycle of breath across lovers, collective dying, ruination and mourning amidst the impacts of industrial societies, this performance deals with three dimensions of loving: the physical, the nonreciprocal and the communal. While interweaving poetry of love songs with literary prose, the artists invite visitors to meditate on the potential of a collective mourning for the loved ones we lost.

 

Fatma Aydemir is a writer and journalist based in Berlin. She is a co-founder and editor of the German literary magazine Delfi. Her debut novel Ellbogen came out in 2017 and was adapted as a movie in 2023. Her second novel Djinns (2022) won several literary awards and will be published in English in 2024 by the University of Wisconsin Press. Together with Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, she published the essay collection Eure Heimat ist Unser Albtraum (Your Homeland Is Our Nightmare, 2019). Aydemir is a Guardian columnist and rewrote Goethe’s classic theatre play Faust from a feminist perspective (Doktormutter.Faust, 2024). She curates and moderates the discourse event series Materien at Schauspiel Essen.

Anthony Hüseyin is a non-binary musician and performance artist of Kurdish-Turkish and Arabic descent who works with voice, text, film, dance and installation. Raised in Urfa in Southeastern Turkey, where they learned traditional local music, they went on to study both classical and jazz singing in Istanbul and Rotterdam. They have released three albums: Safran (2012), The Lucky One (2017), Project O (2022). Anthony Hüseyin taught singing for seven years at Rotterdam Conservatory, Codarts. Recently two of Anthony Hüseyin’s works that had been commissioned by Marina Abramović Institute were performed at Theater Carré in Amsterdam during the long-term performance-exhibition No Intermission. In 2023, Anthony Hüseyin composed and produced music for the queer theater play Amore and worked as a musical director-composer and actor in the play titled Djinns by Fatma Aydemir at Maxim Gorki theater in February 2023. Anthony Hüseyin released the EP O Biçim Şarkılar - O Shaped Songs in November 2023.