Emre Koyuncuoğlu: "Rewriting History and the Staging of Political Memory"

QMUL's Drama Department welcome you to the next edition of our public seminar series. A 40-minute talk will be followed by refreshments and a Q&A/open discussion on the topic of THEATRE AND HISTORY.

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Istanbul-based director Emre Koyuncuoğlu revisits the creation and long-term impact of the site-specific performance Sinop Commune-ication (2006) — an oppositional, multimedia, and interactive work staged at the historic Sinop Prison: a former site of exile and incarceration for many Turkish intellectuals and dissidents.

Co-created with Berlin-based author/curator Tobias Hering for the inaugural Sinopale International Art Biennial, this project interrogated official narratives of Turkish political history and proposed an alternative, pluralist memory space through the lens of collective performance, archive-building, and postdramatic dramaturgy. The artists took as reference and method Peter Watkins’ 1999 film La Commune — Paris 1871, which merges documentary and fiction, performer and character, present and past, to transform a static memorial into a living, breathing space for utopian speculation and critical resistance.

In this talk, Emre will reflect on the potential for performance to act as a tool for rewriting official history, the implications of using a former prison as performative site to stage counter-narratives, and crucially, how to archive and re-engage such a temporally and spatially specific performance almost 15 years later, in light of shifting political climates, censorship, and cultural memory policies in Turkey.

Framing performance as a method of historiographic intervention — challenging linear, nationalist narratives and opening space for multiplicity, contradiction, and dialogue — this talk will interrogate how we preserve the radical potential of site-specific political performances beyond their initial moment? What forms of alternative archiving are necessary to keep these histories alive — not as nostalgia, but as ongoing acts of resistance?

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Emre Koyuncuoğlu is an Istanbul-based director, playwright and curator. She has written, adapted, translated and directed numerous plays, both in Turkey and internationally. Her play Home Sweet Home, a co-production of the Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels) and Tanz im August (Berlin), was staged in various European cities, and in 2010, she was invited to stage an adaptation of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise at the Freiburg City Theatre. In 2015, she created and directed Proust–Pamuk: Memory at the Jan Kochanowski Theatre in Opole, Poland; in 2017, she staged her original work Silent Migration, and in 2023, wrote and directed Halide. Words of Flame at Munich Kammerspiele.

Emre has also created several site-specific works: in 2006, she directed Sinop Communication for the historic prison of Sinop as part of the Sinopale; in 2007, she wrote and directed Room of One’s Own No:104 for a hotel room at the Lush Hotel in Istanbul. In 2016, she launched the multidisciplinary performance arts festival Stage at the Museum (Müzede Sahne) in the garden of the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, curating it for six consecutive years, each edition built around a specific concept.

Emre currently teaches at Koç University, alongside her work as a resident director at the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality City Theatres, where she founded the Contemporary Performing Arts Center (ÇGSM).

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This is a hybrid event — online attendees will receive a Microsoft Teams link shortly before the event. In-person attendees should arrive at Rehearsal Room 2 (Arts One, Mile End Campus) at 5.30pm for a 5.45pm start. Please register attendance to help us plan the event.