Suspended Flesh, Performed Friction * Göksu Kunak’s queer biomechanics of desire, verticality, and staged vulnerability

 

Göksu Kunak’s performative lexicon emerges as a radical choreography of tension, suspension, and gendered embodiment, where the body becomes both site and vector of critique, suspended quite literally in harnesses that evoke BDSM aesthetics, climbing gear, and theatrical contraptions, forcing a visceral confrontation with gravity, gaze, and performativity itself; through a fusion of high heels, stockings, industrial ropes and institutional settings, Kunak cultivates a language of queer prosthesis, staging not identity but friction—between verticality and drag, resistance and surrender, exposure and control—as the artist dangles, contorts or ascends within constructed spatial frames, troubling normative readings of passivity or spectacle, and instead re-signifying the female-coded figure as an agent of endurance, erotic resistance and aesthetic defiance; in these suspended interventions, the performer's physical effort is never masked, sweat, strain and breath becoming dramaturgical elements in themselves, as seen in works where they are mid-air, screaming or whispering, inverted and bound, never ornamental but insistently embodied, the apparatus always visible, rendering the stage not a place of illusion but one of structural revelation; a key instance is their work Best Seat Not in the House, where their mid-air position, clad in fetish-wear, stages an uncomfortable spectacle of control, challenging not only gendered assumptions but also institutional complicity in consuming such affective labour; informed by posthuman theory and drag epistemologies, Kunak’s practice inserts the unstable, performative body into sterile spaces—galleries, white cubes, glass buildings—where it becomes a contaminant, a site of erotic leakage and somatic resistance, destabilising boundaries of architecture, gender and spectatorship alike, forging a performative aesthetics that is not about endurance for its own sake, but about sculpting time through bodily thresholds and affective charge, enacting a critique from within the frame, a tension held but never resolved.