Politics of Heartbreak #1 + #2

#1 Finding Home in Becoming Strangers

With Anatolian Women’s Choir, Ece Temelkuran, 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. A. 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, in letters to strangers – potentially to all of us – a literary language 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 discussion with parallelgesellschaft, a post-German, intersectional artists’ collective 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 joint singing session 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 all.

 

#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 captures 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 group of people explores this question of visibility and being heard further in a discussion: 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.

Next date: Politics of Heartbreak #1 und #2

• Date Saturday, 10/October/2026 18:00 ( 1 more date )
• Venue HAU Hebbel am Ufer - HAU1
• Address Stresemannstraße 29 A, 10963 Berlin-Kreuzberg
• Price from €15.00

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