Verem. Lovesick: With Fatma Aydemir and Anthony Hüseyin

In the organizer's words:

If lovers are essentially sufferers, can the fulfillment of their longings ever be healing? As part of the public program Six Days of Love, which accompanies Pallavi Paul's exhibition How Love Moves, Fatma Aydemir and Anthony Hüseyin explore the cultural metaphors surrounding love as a state of (un)health in their musical reading performance.

While in English or German one becomes unspecifically lovesick, in Turkish suffering lovers get verem - which can be translated overwhelmingly specifically as "tuberculosis". Inspired by and in dialog with Pallavi Paul's exhibition How Love Moves, which traces the cycle of breath between lovers, collective dying, destruction, decay and mourning in industrial societies, this performance deals with three forms of love: the physical, the unrequited and the communal. By interweaving the poetry of love songs with literary prose, the two artists invite us to feel the potential of collective mourning for loved ones we have lost.

Fatma Aydemir is a writer and journalist based in Berlin. She is co-founder and editor of the German literary magazine Delfi. Her debut novel Ellbogen was published in 2017 and was made into a film in 2023. Her second novel Dschinns (2022) was awarded several literary prizes and will be published in English in 2024 with University of Wisconsin Press. Together with Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, she published the essay collection Eure Heimat ist Unser Albtraum (2019). Fatma Aydemir is a columnist for The Guardian and has rewritten Goethe's classic play Faust from a feminist perspective(Doktormutter.Faust, 2024). She also 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 Arab origin and works with voice, text, film, dance and installation. Anthony Hüseyin grew up in Urfa in south-eastern Turkey, where he learned traditional local music and then studied both classical and jazz singing in Istanbul and Rotterdam. Anthony Hüseyin's published albums include: Safran (2012), The Lucky One (2017) and Project O (2022). Anthony Hüseyin taught singing at the Rotterdam Conservatory Codarts for seven years. Recently, two works by Anthony Hüseyin commissioned by the Marina Abramović Institute were performed at Theater Carré in Amsterdam during the long-term performance exhibition No Intermission (2022). In 2023, Anthony Hüseyin composed and produced music for a queer theater play titled Amore and collaborated as musical director, composer and actor in the production of the play Dschinns by Fatma Aydemir at Maxim Gorki Theater in February 2023. In November 2023, Anthony Hüseyin released an EP titled O Biçim Şarkılar - O Shaped Songs.

Meeting point: Gropius Bau, 1st floor

Multilingual

Free tickets for the event can be booked from June 7 at 12 noon at the box office and online.

Price information:

Free tickets for the event can be booked from June 7 at 12 noon at the box office and online.