Politics of Heartbreak

Featuring the Anatolian Women’s Choir, Ece Temelkuran and parallelgesellschaft.

The lawyer, writer and journalist Ece Temelkuran understands the anatomy of authoritarianism – and the heartache that remains when a country becomes a foreign land. After years of critical reporting on the Erdoğan government and Kurdistan, she left Turkey in 2016.

In her book *How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship* (2019), she dissects how democracies gradually disintegrate; in *Nation of Strangers: ‘We Are Our Homeland’ (2026), a deeply personal yet political perspective on the world, she finds a literary voice in letters to strangers through which the loss of belonging can be shared and new connections emerge from a shared sense of alienation.

Following her keynote speech, Ece Temelkuran will engage in a conversation with parallelgesellschaft, a post-German, intersectional collective of artists that has been working since 2017 at the intersection of critical literary formats, curatorial practice and political-poetic intervention.

The evening will be framed by the Anatolian Women’s Choir. This choir emerged from a spontaneous group sing-along at a funeral and was founded by women with experiences of migration and exile. Between political analysis and choral voices, the central question of “Love is a Verb” unfolds: how does heartache transform from a private emotion into a political condition that connects us to one another?

#2 Mourning as Resistance with Azadeh Ganjeh, Kubra Khademi and Simin Jawabreh

On 19 July 2021, the performance artist, academic, dramaturg and activist Azadeh Ganjeh came across an Instagram video: it shows and features the protest of an Iranian woman – yet it remains unclear who she is or what becomes of her. In her lecture-performance “Not a Body for Burial”, Ganjeh takes this video as the starting point for a collective search: Who is seen, who is heard? And who belongs to the “we” that is watching?

Her research leads to bodies which, as Ganjeh puts it, “belong to the state, the map, the war museum” – people whose stories are rendered invisible, whose lives vanish into statistics. By making a person, their story and their background visible, Ganjeh restores a measure of agency to them and reminds us that behind the statistics of people who suffer and die in the struggle for their rights, there is always an individual life. The research is followed by a traditional funeral dance: a mourning for people whose bodies are no longer there, who could be buried.

Afterwards, a discussion group explores this question of visibility and being heard further: what happens to feminist and progressive resistance when it is once again rendered invisible in the wake of escalating geopolitical tensions?

Azadeh Ganjeh, Simin Jawabreh and Kubra Khademi speak – spanning Iran, Palestine and Afghanistan – about resistance as a form of grief: “Resistance as Grief”.

17 Oct.

#3 How to Keep Going with Broken Hearts?

With Şeyda Kurt, Alice Hasters, D-Dur Dykes*

What sustains us when so much seems lost? In her books, the journalist and author Şeyda Kurt has repeatedly explored political emotions – tenderness, anger, hatred – not as private matters, but as a starting point for social change. She distinguishes between emotions that paralyse and those that sustain. The latter keep us moving forward, rather than causing us to freeze, on the path towards a fairer society.

In her books, journalist and author Alice Hasters describes how vulnerability is socially negotiated, devalued or exploited – and how closely this is linked to the rise of harshness and authoritarianism. Her question is not merely how to name crises, but what remains possible beyond hardening: what power lies in connectedness and vulnerability when both are socially despised?

In conversation, Şeyda Kurt and Alice Hasters ask: What does resilience mean when certainties crumble? What does resistance look like when it focuses not on victory but on holding firm – and how does shared heartache become a source of strength that sustains us?

The evening concludes with D-Dur Dykes* – queer choral singing bridging the community and the big stage.

IN ENGLISH