Nadir Sönmez

Actor, writer and director. He studied theater at Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle University and completed a master's degree in acting at Kadir Has University. He produces theater, film and performance projects.

He wrote, directed, and acted in the plays “Peki” (2017 - Pera Museum, 2021 - Sabancı Museum), “Ama” (2019 Istanbul Fringe Festival, 2021 Dresden European Festival for Young Directors), and “Bro!” (2024). In 2022, he prepared and performed his solo lecture performance “Diyarbakır.Tourism.Romanticism.Activism” supported by CultureCIVIC in Turkey, and later at Athens Lala Queer House of Underground Arts and Berlin Apartment Project. He was invited to the Ljubljana Mladi Levi Festival in 2024.

In 2021, he was selected for the three-month Trame artist residency program at Paris Cité Internationale des Arts and staged a reading of his play written in French, “Sons of Heterosexuals.” He was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen International Forum in 2023.

In 2024, he released a Youtube video series titled “In Pursuit of Theater” set in Van, Dersim, Erzurum, and Kars. His first feature film “Ama” was featured on Mubi.

Gay tourist

At the end of his residency at SAHA Studio, Nadir Sönmez presents a video-performance project shaped around autobiographical narratives, focusing on gay tourism in Istanbul and Europe. Revisiting texts he had written in past years, Sönmez realizes that some recurring themes in his recent artistic practice can be traced back further than he initially remembers. The tourist perspective, which gained both a conceptual and aesthetic depth in his lecture performance Diyarbakır.Tourism.Romanticism.Activism, expands with an ethnographic and humorous layer in his video Çark that celebrates local nuances within the global gay cruising culture. Sönmez’s new project is both an extension of these earlier works and an attempt to position them as part of an artistic journey that has gained new coherence over time. 

Alongside revising draft texts recounting his sexual memories of gay saunas, baths, and nightclubs in Istanbul and Europe, Sönmez also writes new pieces and preparing a narrative to be exhibited across various media. He reflects on how gay sexuality brings him into contact with men from social classes he wouldn’t typically intersect with in his social or professional life. To evoke the emotional resonance of these encounters, he designs a physical space. The Balance Sheet of My Shyness features low-quality towels, reminiscent of those in Istanbul’s gay baths, adorned with tourist pins listing various professions. This object, which displays the occupations of men he’s had sexual encounters with throughout his adult life, explores class and sociological dynamics within the installation space. A massage table inspired by gay masseurs in Istanbul allows visitors to lie down and watch a video from an unusual position, with a screen placed beneath the headrest. Sönmez plans to read the stories he revised during his residency to the visitors lying on the table, in a soft voice, creating an intimate, personal, literary, and erotic performance experience.

Concurrently, the artist also works on a manifesto that defines the principles of an imaginary space called Şantiye (Construction Site). Inspired by Jean Genet’s The Balcony, which critiques power dynamics in a brothel where influential figures like bishops and police chiefs are role-played, Sönmez flips this perspective. He imagines a realm of sexual fantasy where roles include laborers, truck drivers, and repairmen. By presenting working class men's perspective on sexuality in a parodic text that combines intellectual art jargon and slang, Sönmez reveals the irony of the different ways in which homosexuality is experienced according to social strata.

Throughout the SAHA Studio term, Sönmez has been taking photos with visitors who shake hands with him outside the program space, collecting these as part of a performance archive. Reflecting on the difference between performance documentation and staged photography, these images also align conceptually with his project by evoking tourist marketing tactics, potentially marking the beginning of an ongoing series.

In another video performance project produced during his residency, Sönmez imagines himself as an artist exhibiting at the Istanbul Queer Museum, and announces that he will undergo a vasectomy operation as a gay man for the sake of performance art. The idea of undergoing a medical procedure for birth control despite having a sexuality unlikely to result in procreation references the documentation and archiving of unrealized performances. Critiquing the intense physical relationship performance art often demands, he employs humorous theatricality, presenting his video work within this fictional discourse to expand the audience’s experience. 

While reflecting on the tourist aspects of his relationship with his surroundings, Sönmez filmed Istanbul’s Avcılar coastline. Compounded with images shot during trips to Ljubljana, Venice, Vienna, and Budapest, each of these videos combined with texts address the universal themes like loneliness, career, and sexuality from the inner voice of a single gay man in his thirties.