About

About reframes my housewife mother's domestic labor as a prolific performance art career. A hybrid stage work combining queer autobiographical performance and documentary video art, built for today's fragmented attention spans, playfully moving between Turkish, English and French. 

Video-performance, 20', work-in-progress, 2026

Writer, performer, video, editing

Nadir Sönmez

Produced with the support of Forecast Festival in Berlin

Premiered at Radialsystem on 18 July 2026

About treats my mother's life as a performance artist bio: her experience of giving birth reframed as radical performance art, her panic attack diagnosis as a form of pioneering research in mental health. Through this vocabulary, the piece asks what happens to motherhood and domestic work once they are translated into the language contemporary art uses to describe itself.

The videos capture her tastes, relationships, and travels while questioning distinctions between amateur and professional image-making. Drawing on my own trajectory within Turkey’s art world, I use this project to transfer hard-won privilege to my mother, challenging who is recognized as an artist.