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Video, 7', 2025 A fictional manifesto by working-class men from Turkey who desire to be more sexually fetishized. Subverting nationalism with the tools of gay pornography, this essay film mocks today’s sexual caution and the art world’s romanticization of the lower classes. Scenes of demolishing buildings merge with the poetic view of a harbor under snow, paralleling the contrast between the aggressiveness of physical labor and the emotional vulnerability of hardworking men.

Video, 10', 2025 Beginning with memories of steamy childhood hammams, an oil wrestler retraces the personal history of his hidden desire. A black-and-white fantasy of Oriental male strength turns into a satire on the façade of progressiveness in European queer culture and the art world. This essay film searches for sexual liberty where it is least expected, transforming a national emblem of virility into a fragile choreography of intimacy. Text, video, voice-over and editing

Video, 6', 2024 Outdoor gay sex culture is traditionally preserved in an anonymous park in İstanbul. A low-resolution night, a camera dancing the choreography of cruising, the formal voice-over of a horny narrator, and bodies that imprint their absence. It is an ethnography of macho lust in the dark, spanning from the local to the European. Text, video, voice-over and editing Nadir Sönmez Music Mert Kocadayı It is produced for the video series project of the Altyazı Cinema As

Video series, 30', 2024 In these video series produced with the support of SAHA Studio, Sönmez interprets universal themes such as loneliness, career and sexuality through the inner voice of a single gay man in his thirties, with texts accompanying the images he shot during his travels in Ljubljana, Venice, Vienna and Budapest. Video, text, voice-over and editing Nadir Sönmez Voice-over Uğur Arda Başkan Music Mert Kocadayı

A press conference for an exhibition about gay tourism in a fictional museum. Performance, 20', 2024 Writer and director Nadir Sönmez Performers Nadir Sönmez İnci Sefa Cingöz Selin Hasar Selected Performances SAHA Studio, 2024 İstanbul Fringe Festival, 2025 Curator: This exhibition emerged as a result of you revisiting your sixteen years of adult sexual life. You see your sexuality as a cultural value for both our country and world art history. Sometimes, you make love to Hol

Play, 60', 2024 Two men who met at the gym go to one's place, sit on a couch and have a conversation about mundanities until their evening is interrupted by a cheated sister and an intrusive delivery guy. The play deals with the erotic and social tension through contemporary themes such as bromance in the context of Turkish masculinity, single people's loneliness in big cities, open relationships' inability to overcome young adult romantic crisis’ or racism towards Arabs in İ

Play, 60', 2018 Gallery owner Beril and contemporary artist Tilbe meet for a coffee. They talk behind the backs of their acquaintances from the Istanbul art community, about their projects and their private lives. Kürşat, the waiter who comes to ask about their orders, reminds them of a place they have encountered before. An underground party in Dolapdere had brought them together before. Inspired by the desire to eavesdrop on what is being said at the next table while in a

Lecture Performance, 70', 2022 Nadir Sönmez narrates Kurdish LGBTIQ+ activism in Diyarbakır; through autobiographical performance, essay film and documentary theatre. On one side, there is a gay francophone Turkish artist. On the other side there are Kurdish LGBTIQ+ activists. Queer visibility and solidarity seem to function differently in their lives. This is aesthetically felt in the use of light and darkness. Under the brightness of the projection light, Nadir Sönmez talk

Video, 15', 2021 An unpublished writer wrote an erotic fiction, narrating the love affair between a Turkish woman and a Syrian refugee man. An editor reads passages from the draft and tries to convince the writer to publish it as a self-help book in Europe. Their conversation is a sexual parody of occidental literary glance at the refugee crisis. Funded by Borderline Offensive Writer and director Nadir Sönmez Actors Çisil Oğuz Nadir Sönmez İlda Özgürel S. Emrah Özdemir Select

Staged reading, 2021, Paris Cité Internationale des Arts, 30' Mehmet dreams of making a pornographic film in order to represent Turkey at the Venice Biennale. To prepare for the project, he temporarily settles in Paris. There, he meets Bruno, a porn actor, and regularly consults Quentin, a psychotherapist. The play explores male desire. The three male characters use words to stimulate one another intellectually and sexually. Writer and director Nadir Sönmez Actors Nadir Sönme

Feature Film, 64', 2022 Ama offers a sarcastic look at the contradictions and inconsistencies of artists in Istanbul as they attempt to adapt to Western-based gender discourses. The film unfolds as a dialectical dialogue filled with erotic tension, questioning how professional jargon shapes their language and how their relationship with fiction and performance blurs the boundaries between their private and professional lives. The aesthetics between theater and film raise ques

Play, 60', 2019 Ama means but in English. It is a conversation piece about art, power, sex and role play in the Turkish intellectual scene. In four scenes, Nadir Sönmez creates a portrait of a small group of artists who examine their own profession with equal criticism and sarcasm, and overstep the boundaries between work and private life more than once. It’s the dialogues that form the heart of the theatrical situation here and give Sönmez and his five fellow performers a wi