Finissage + Nadir Sönmez – Screening Cruising and Presentation

Saturday, November 29, 2025, 7 p.m.

NAK has secured the participation of multidisciplinary Turkish artist Nadir Sönmez for the accompanying program to Janis Löhrer‘s exhibition Right Place, Wrong Time. Sönmez and Janis Löhrer met during the German artist’s stay in Istanbul and became interested in each other’s artistic practices due to their shared content and aesthetic approaches. As part of the exhibition, Sönmez will show Cruising and other film works at the closing event and talk about his artistic work. Janis Löhrer will also be present that evening.

Nadir Sönmez is one of the co-directors of Seen Unseen: An Anthology of (Auto)Censorship, whose video Cruisingwas presented this year as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s Doc Fortnight. Building on this work and using irony to circumvent authority, he questions the assumption that Europe’s “better life” and “freer art” should define queer existence in Turkey. Cruising unfolds as a fictional letter to UNESCO calling for the preservation of outdoor gay sex culture in an anonymous neighborhood in Istanbul. Through low-resolution night shots, a formal but excited voiceover, and bodies that impress their absence, the film composes an ethnography of macho lust in the dark. Sönmez refuses to portray queer art in Turkey merely as heroic survival under conservative conditions, instead resorting to the language of nationalism and traditional masculinity as counterweapons to depict men’s desire for men.
Nadir Sönmez is an Istanbul-based actor, author, director, and interdisciplinary artist. He studied theater at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris and holds a master’s degree in theater studies from Kadir Has Üniversitesi in Istanbul.

Sönmez is the creator of the performances Peki (Pera Museum, 2017 / Sabancı Museum, 2021), Ama (Istanbul Fringe Festival, 2019 / European Festival for Young Directors, Dresden, 2021), Les Fils des Hétérosexuels (Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, 2021), Diyarbakır.Tourism. Romanticism. Activism (Ljubljana Mladi Levi Festival, 2024) and Gay Tourist (İstanbul SAHA Studio, 2025). His debut feature film Ama was released on MUBI Turkey in 2022. He was selected for the International Forum at the Theatertreffen (2023) and for the Summer School of the Performing Exiles Festival (2025) in Berlin. As part of the anthology Seen Unseen, his video Cruising was selected for the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Copenhagen CPH:DOX, and New York MoMA Doc Fortnight.