Göksu Kunak
Credit: Max Kneefel
Göksu Kunak (b. 1985, Ankara) is an artist, researcher, and writer based in Berlin. Working across performance, installation, and text, their practice draws on Arabesk culture, late modernity, and orientalist discourse to examine processes of self-Orientalization, camouflage, self-censorship, and speculative fiction.
Through choreographed movement, sound, and hybrid textual forms, Kunak investigates chronopolitics and the performative languages of contemporary life, exploring the body as a site where power, identity, and cultural imaginaries converge.
Kunak's work has been presented internationally in exhibitions, festivals, and performance platforms. In 2025, they received the Akademie der Künste Kunstpreis (Berlin Prize for Art) in the category of Performing Arts, recognizing their distinctive contribution to contemporary performance and interdisciplinary artistic practice.
Recent projects focus on score-based performances and installations that approach the body as both simulacrum and sculptural object, with particular attention to musculature, endurance, embodiment, and the politics of physical representation. Alongside their artistic practice, Kunak continues to develop research into performance as a critical method for rethinking history, identity, and cultural memory.