The Rehearsal & The Playbook

Following the first chapter in Istanbul, we warmly welcome STRÜKTÜR for the launch of their fall programme in the SAVVY house: THE REHEARSAL & THE PLAYBOOK critically examines the transforming expressive and choreographic mechanisms of authoritarian and populist movements. Taking Turkey as a point of departure, the project traces how authoritarian and populist dynamics reverberate across borders, shaping bodies, gestures, and collective imagination. Through performances, installations, and moving-image works, the programme stages encounters with the tensions between obedience and refusal, intimacy and control, solidarity, resistance, and confinement.

After they premiered in Istanbul, the commissioned works will now be presented in Berlin, offering distinct entry points into the notion of rehearsal: 

İrem Aydın presents The Blue Bed, a performance developed through collective writing workshops in Istanbul and Berlin, combining text, projection, and live reading. At its core is a meditation on hüzün: a Turkish word often deemed untranslatable, carrying shades of collective loss, lingering sorrow, and a beauty found in endurance. Here, hüzün is refracted through queer experience, becoming both a record of harm and a space of possibility – an emotional commons. The work moves through migratory melancholy, the ache of staying, the grief of leaving, and the solidarities that take shape between those who move and those who remain, while gesturing towards the potentiality of queering hüzün.

Zeynep Dadak and Çiçek Kahraman’s video essay Weird Absurd Whatever takes as its point of departure the absence of their friend, filmmaker Çiğdem Mater, imprisoned since 2022 as one of the Gezi trial defendants. The work lingers on the fragile space between artistic impulse and political constraint: How can collaboration continue in the face of absence? How do fear and self-censorship seep into the rehearsal room of imagination, shaping what can or cannot be said? Through dreams, mundane notes, speculative images, and fragments of shared memory, the film treats rehearsal itself as a form of resistance – an unfinished, provisional space where dialogue remains possible. The act of imagining Çiğdem Mater as an artist whose freedom has been restored becomes both a meditation on cinematic solidarity and a refusal of erasure.  

Selin Davasse’s When the wolf howls on the plain, the dog’s chest aches at home / Düzlükte kurt ulusa, evde itin bağrı sızlar (2025) is a performance about two animals in two languages. In Turkish proverbs, the dog embodies servitude, abasement, and shamelessness; the wolf, by contrast, signals sovereignty, ferocity, and carnivorous virility. In contemporary Turkish politics, stray dogs are vilified as urban threats while mythical wolves are exalted as nation-forming symbols. Across languages – English, Turkish, Greek, Italian – the word for “female dog” endures as an insult against unruly, promiscuous, or treacherous women. Tracking these entanglements of animality, language, and dominion, Selin Davasse performs as bitch and she-wolf, chewing through vulnerability, interdependence, and monstrosity. Shifting registers, she alternates between canine and lupine bodies as sites where authoritarianism is rehearsed – and resisted – while sniffing out possibilities for collaborative contracts of (self)-domestication and coexistence, human and more-than-human.

Ali Miharbi’s Live Eyes (2025) isolates the most fleeting yet telling detail of televised politics: the eyes. Using custom software with face detection algorithms, Miharbi extracts the gazes of anchors, politicians, and commentators from real-time Turkish broadcasts, magnifies them, and releases them into silence. In this expanded fivechannel installation produced for The Rehearsal & The Playbook, the viewer is subjected to a crossfire of gazes sourced from multiple media outlets – accusatory, persuasive, panicked, blank – inside a media landscape thick with surveillance, disinformation, and scripted outrage. 

Commissioned by SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA, Ein neues Wort (2025) by Cana Bilir-Meier builds on a 1970 competition in West Germany that sought an alternative to the term “Gastarbeiter” (“guest worker”). In Munich, a choir made up predominantly of former labor migrants of Turkish descent draws inspiration from the more than 30,000 submissions and develops its own musical interpretation. Together with the choir, Bilir Meier explores an approach to linguistic labels that is both encouraging and deconstructive – a reappropriation of words that at times appear overtly racist, often hurtful or derogatory, yet also absurd or emptied of meaning. 

TALKS AND PUBLICATION 
STRÜKTÜR’s fall programme The Rehearsal & The Playbook is further complemented by a series of discursive events and interventions. The Webinar Series with 
international scholars opened on August 20, 2025, with philosopher and author Alberto Toscano in a conversation on Antifascism in Rehearsal. The series concludes on October 25, 2025 with a lecture by author and cultural theorist Ana Teixeira Pinto at SAVVY Contemporary titled Oh Man! The world ends, masculinity endures.

STRÜKTÜR will debut these talks, together with the newly commissioned works, transcripts, and reflections from the above-mentioned contributors via its online platform under the section The Playbook. 
 

STRÜKTÜR  is a Berlin-based association dedicated to building and expanding support structures for art and artists from the geography of Turkey. At its core is the collective production of diasporic and critical discourse and knowledge, as well as the cultivation of trans-communal exchange. Through thematic programmes, publications, workshops, and public programmes, STRÜKTÜR seeks to root, grow, and disperse artistic research and diasporic thinking across borders, communities, and generations.

Performistanbul founded in 2016, is an Istanbul-based international platform dedicated to performance art. Embracing a “spaceless” identity, it has collaborated with institutions including the Pera Museum, SALT, OMM, the Istanbul Biennial, Tate Modern, and the V&A Museum, realising nearly 400 performances with over 100 artists. Performistanbul has also established the Live Art Research Space (PCSAA), founded Performistanbul Publications, and launched a performance art residency – all aimed at advancing research, education, and resources for performance art both locally and globally.