Nottingham Contemporary

Polly Barton is a Japanese literary translator. Her translations include Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job by Kikuko Tsumura, and Spring Garden by Tomoka Shibasaki. She won the 2019 Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for Fifty Sounds. She lives in Bristol.

Kübra Uzun is an Istanbul-based singer, songwriter, performance artist, DJ, and LGBTQIA+ rights activist, working in Turkey and also on an international basis on various platforms. Kübra wrote, sang and produced the song titled ‘ALAN2020’ with Mx. Sür and it became an anthem during Istanbul Pride in June 2020. In December 2020, Kübra Uzun performed ‘A Trans History Sung’, a digital monument directed by Onur Karaoğlu, in collaboration with Volksbühne Berlin digital season: Next Waves Theatre. They worked with Simon(e) van Saarloos to create an audio work 'Cruising Gezi Park’ which is shown in the exhibition titled 'Refresh Amsterdam’ at Amsterdam Museum from December 2020 till June 2021. In January 2021, They recorded 'Koli Kanonu’, originally Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s KV 560, and shot the video directed by Efe Durmaz - performing all four of the different voices and characters by themselves. In March 2022, They recorded 'Jülyet’s Habanera’, originally Georges Bizet’s Habanera from Carmen, and again shot the video directed by Efe Durmaz. In November 2022, They performed 'Ah Bu Şarkıların Gözü Kör Olsun’ under the performance series titled 'Everything, Everything, Everything’ within the programme of '90’s On Stage’ exhibition at SALT Galata. Kübra Uzun is also the coordinator of Through The Window Project: An online project aims to gather queer artists, thinkers and night workers from Turkey, The Netherlands and beyond and co-founder and co-curator of XSM Recordings: The revolutionary mothering project that expands and queers the boundaries of definitions, welcoming the opening of spaces and commune liberation as a record label, event series, art platform and solidarity projects since June 2020 and still.

Tuna Erdem is an artist and creative producer based in London. She has been a founding member of the Istanbul Queer Art Collective since 2012 and the co-director of Queer Art Projects since 2017. She holds an MA in Art and Film Theory from the University of Kent and a PhD in Film, TV, and Theatre from Reading University. A bit of a jack-of-all-trades, she has dabbled in various fields, including journalism, film criticism, performance, writing, curation, producing and lecturing on various subjects, including pornography. Similarly, her artistic work encompasses a diverse range of forms, from performance and video art, to collage and sound art. However, writing, performing, and a strong connection to lived experience are common threads that run throughout her body of work.