Gürsoy Doğtaş

Gürsoy Doğtaş, author and cultural scholar, explores the queer politics of the feeling of hüzün – a culturally specific sort of melancholy in the Turkish-language region – in the music of the Turkish singer Zeki Müren. In 2014, he edited with Alejandra Labastida the publication The Politics of the Melancholic Voice – Zeki Müren’s ‘Kahır Mektubu’ (Letter of Sorrow) in the frame of ICI in New York. In 2017, he was invited by the Wiener Festwochen to a reading performance drawing from his novel project Zeki Müren – The Displayed Life (An Unauthorized Biography). In the winter semester of 2017/18, he held the reading seminar Writing the gay self: Diaries, Autobiographies and Autofictions at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2018, he will expand his research on Rembetiko (music in the tradition of the Ottoman Empire) with a curator grant from the Goethe-Institute in Thessaloniki. He curated the discursive program for Public Art Munich 2018.