by Işıl İlkter // Sept. 29, 2026
This article is part of our feature topic Performativity.
At the Transgressive Memory Festival during Berlin Art Week, caner teker’s ‘KIRKPINAR’ saw two performers in an encounter that looked, at different moments, like a contest, a dance and an embrace. The work takes its starting point from Yağlı Güreş, the Turkish oil wrestling tradition celebrated at Kırkpınar, an annual competition in Edirne, northwestern Türkiye. Kırkpınar’s origins are traditionally dated to 1361. Since the performance’s first presentation in 2020, teker has returned to it several times, reshaping a sport built around victory into a choreography of endurance and suspended outcomes. The oil and costume remain the same as in its traditional reference, as does the proximity between the wrestlers, but without the familiar ending of defeat. In the performance, other relationships come into view: between intensity and care, performer and spectator and the live event and the documented images that outlive it. Here, teker discusses how diaspora informed their first encounter with the sport, why they omitted its decisive move, as well as how sound and documentation shape the work.
caner teker: ‘KIRKPINAR,’ 2026, at Transgressive Memory Festival // Photo by Moses Omeogo
Işıl İlkter: ‘KIRKPINAR’ has been part of your practice since 2020. What first drew you to Turkish oil wrestling as choreographic material, and what brings you back to the work six years later?
caner teker: My relationship to Turkish culture has always been shaped by diaspora, uprooting and a difficult search for identity. I first encountered oil wrestling through images of Kırkpınar, the annual competition in Edirne, Türkiye. The tradition felt both familiar and distant. In Germany, I am Turkish; in Türkiye, I am German. Yağlı Güreş occupies that same border. What drew me in was a contradiction. The sport presents itself as a fight, yet I saw oiled bodies holding each other for minutes in front of thousands of people. I began ‘KIRKPINAR’ by asking why I could not look away. Since then, the work has moved from theaters to museums and into the collection of Museum Ostwall. This performance will be archived beyond my death, so it will keep appearing for many more years to come.
Iİ: Watching the performance, I was struck by how the choreography moves between dance, a struggle for power and something more intimate and caring. How do competition, intimacy and care coexist between the two performers?
ct: I do not treat them as opposites, and neither does the sport. To wrestle someone, you have to hold them, carry their weight and listen to their breath. Competition requires attention to another body, even if it refuses to call itself that. In ‘KIRKPINAR,’ I slow this attention down until it can no longer remain hidden. The tempo is set by muscular endurance rather than the desire to win. What remains are two people negotiating balance and trust over a long duration. Here, care is physical labor. I keep the bodies close to what they cannot resolve, where aggression and tenderness remain within the same grip. Masculinity depends on this closeness and punishes it at the same time. That contradiction is the material I work with.
caner teker: ‘KIRKPINAR,’ 2026, at Transgressive Memory Festival // Photo by Moses Omeogo
Iİ: The bodies repeatedly approach positions of dominance or defeat, but the movement resists arriving at a conventional victory. How did you translate the sport’s rules and physical vocabulary into choreography?
ct: I studied the sport’s holds, grips and transitions primarily through images and reduced them to a set of positions, which became a score. Oil wrestling is organized around one result: a wrestler’s back touching the ground. I removed that goal entirely. The performers pass through positions of dominance and defeat, but the score never allows either of them to arrive at a fixed outcome. Each position is held until endurance gives way, and only then does the next one begin. For me, this choice is political. We live within systems that organize bodies and resources through competition, rewarding those who win. A work that refuses to produce a winner refuses that logic.
Iİ: Oil wrestling has a strong performative language, from its gestures and rituals to costume, spectatorship and music. What changes when you move it from the sporting arena into a contemporary performance context?
ct: The performativity does not disappear, but what changes most is the gaze. The oil, the leather pants and the announcer already makes the sport a staged event and, in the arena, that staging is directed toward strength and national pride. In a theater or museum, often before a largely white audience, the same gestures are read through desire, projection and exoticization. The costume is never neutral. As soon as it is on, an orientalist gaze begins reading the performer’s body and assigning meaning before the movement starts. I work deliberately with this shift. The piece initially appears to satisfy the expectations attached to an eroticized body, but the longer it does so, the more uncomfortable that satisfaction becomes.
caner teker: ‘KIRKPINAR,’ 2026, at Transgressive Memory Festival // Photo by Moses Omeogo
Iİ: Music is integral to both the sport and your performance. How did you approach the sound of ‘KIRKPINAR,’ and how does it shape the physical encounter between the performers?
ct: I grew up with dance and music belonging together: at weddings, in rituals and in everyday life. Sound is always where my work begins. I am grateful to Valerie Ace and Lou Drago for helping me with this. In the arena, the beat of the davul (drums) and the piercing notes of the zurna (a double-reed wind instrument) mark the wrestlers’ entrance, push them forward and heat up the crowd. I wanted that memory to be present in the room without illustrating it. I do not let sound direct the body or ask the body to illustrate the sound, because that hierarchy reproduces the kind of command the work refuses elsewhere. Sound and movement spar with each other. The music sustains a tension without releasing it, just as the choreography withholds a climax. It surrounds the performers as a structure rather than giving them a beat to follow.
Iİ: In photographs, it can be difficult to distinguish the performance from the sport. What interests you about that ambiguity, and how do you approach the relationship between the live work and its documentation?
ct: I am interested in that confusion. The choreography is built as a succession of held positions, so it produces images easily. In a photograph, the duration and the choreography disappear. What remains is a pose that could belong to either world. This reveals how thin the line has always been. The sport already functioned as an image, a version of masculinity made to circulate and be believed. Photographs of ‘KIRKPINAR’ circulate in a similar way and are sometimes misread, and I allow that to happen. At the same time, the live work cannot be reduced to its documentation. I think of opacity, in Édouard Glissant’s sense, as a way of deciding what a body reveals and what it withholds. A photograph withholds the duration of the encounter. In the beginning, I refused documentation altogether, and to this day no video of the work is available to the public.
caner teker: ‘KIRKPINAR,’ 2026, at Transgressive Memory Festival // Photo by Moses Omeogo
Iİ: After so much physical tension, the performance ends in an intimate exchange of breath. What led you to choose this final gesture, and what does it open up for you?
ct: For me, the breath is connected to what I see when I look at images of oil wrestling. Behind all the strength, the oil and the spectacle, I sense a longing for closeness. To hold and be held, and to touch another body without that touch having to become a fight. Throughout the performance, this intimacy is already there, but it is hidden inside the struggle between the bodies. In the final moment, the shared breath allows it to come to the surface. It does not resolve the tension between violence and intimacy, but it no longer tries to hide it. At a time when bodies are constantly being taught to brace themselves against one another, sharing breath can become an understated political gesture.
Performance Info
Between Bridges Residency
caner teker: ‘b2b / nothing new’
Performance: Oct. 23, 2026
betweenbridges.net
Keithstraße 15, 10787 Berlin, click here for map
Museum Ostwall
caner teker: ‘Kirkpinar’
Performances: Nov. 7 & 14, 2026; 3pm
dortmunder-u.de
U-Dortmund, Leonie-Reygers-Terrasse 2, 44137 Dortmund, Germany, click here for map
