Gay Tourist

Within the scope of SAHA Studio, Nadir Sönmez conducted a research process focusing on gay tourism in the world and produced an installation that incarnates the way his sexuality brought him together with men from different social segments: The Balance Sheet of My Shyness featured touristic pins on a chain suspended from the ceiling, labeled with the occupations of the men with whom he had sexual relations to date. As one of the sociological expansions of this work, a massage bed was installed in the studio space, where visitors could lie down and watch a video in an unusual position by looking at a screen placed under the head rest. Sönmez, who had been also editing and writing new texts about gay saunas, Turkish baths and nightclubs based on his memories of sexuality in Istanbul and Europe, selected synopses among these stories and displayed them on napkins on the radiator next to the massage bed. Reversing the view of power dynamics at a brothel in Jean Genet's play, The Balcony where influential professions such as bishop and police chief are portrayed, Sönmez constructed a realm of sexual fantasy where men of professions such as ironmonger, truck driver and mechanic are heroes. 

In the video-performance Gay Tourist, produced as the epicenter of his residency process, Sönmez positions himself as an artist whose exhibition will open at the Istanbul Queer Museum. The reading performance with İnci Sefa Cingöz as the curator and Selin Hasar as the art viewer parodies the special exhibition previews. Criticizing the violent relationship that performance art establishes with the body and the politically-correct attitude of contemporary sexology in dealing with sexuality by his use of satire, the artist adds yet another dimension to the viewing experience by presenting his video production amidst this fictional discussion. A continuation of the tourist perspective that was layered both conceptually and aesthetically in the presentation performance Diyarbakır.Tourism.Romanticism.Activism, this new video deepens the ethnographic and humorous layer in the Çark video, invoking pride in local factors, as per the context of the “gay cruising” culture that is prevalent all over the world. In his new thirty-minute video work produced with the support of SAHA, 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 Lebanon, Venice, Vienna and Budapest.

Whilst Sönmez pondered the difference between the photographs taken for the performance archive and “staged photography”, the ones he took in front of the program venue with the visitors who wanted to shake hands subscribe to the conceptual framework of the project by recalling the touristic marketing method and suggest the possibility of initiating a perpetual project as these poses embody the dynamics of networking in artistic careers.