Gözde Mimiko Türkkan

15th Bienal de la Habana | Cuba

SAHA supports Gözde Mimiko Türkkan's project as part of the 15th Havana Biennial titled Shared Horizons between 15 November 2024 – 28 February 2025.

Fight like a girl is a series of performances by the artist Gözde Mimiko Türkkan, transforming Havana's oldest boxing arena into an art space during the 15th Biennial de la Havana, and immersing visitors in the world of Muay Thai (Thai boxing).During the Biennial Mimiko collaborates with a group of art professionals in the famous Boxing School of Old Havana. In this transformative performance they will be trained by Mimiko and Cuban coaches to become Thai boxers and compete against each other in classically staged fights, eliminating the traditional division into genders.

The open-air boxing arena will be modified and transformed into an exhibition space with artistic documentary works. Muay Thai, fused with Cuba's famous "hit and not get hit" boxing style is the symbolic battlefield of the performance, where the apparent opposites of strength and vulnerability, rivalry and solidarity not only coexist but also appear intertwined, reflecting the complexities of life itself. Mimiko who is practicing Martial Arts since more than 15 years, tells from the perspective of this sport a story about the urgent need of human beings for community, equality, inclusion and equal treatment.Through the fusion of martial arts and art, conventional perceptions will be challenged and Muay Thai beyond its physical element transfers into an expression of resilience and empowerment.

Gözde Mimiko Türkkan (1984, Ankara) is an artist based in Istanbul who mostly produces videos, photography series, artist’s books and text-based works. The first decade of her practice focuses on gender identities & roles and socially constructed identities while attempting to shed light to some of the deepest drives, desires and fears of the human being through a subjective documentary approach. It also emphasises the human body as the most common outward manifestation of the sexual, psychological, emotional and sociological identity. Besides conducting research aimed at developing ongoing projects, she aims to collect the visual and written materials she is drawn to in daily life and through her own bodily experiences, and reveal the connections and flows between them. As a new phase, she has been working towards exploring the expression of the inner flow — innergy — in human bodies and water-bodies for the last three years.

About the Havana Biennial

The Havana Biennial was established in 1984 and its first edition was dedicated to artists of Latin America and the Caribbean.Since the second Biennial of 1986, also artists from Africa, Asia and the Middle East have taken part. This tradition, which has remained during each of the subsequent editions, turned Havana into an important venue for the gathering and exhibition of ‘non-Western’ art. Now, the Havana Biennial takes place within an allegedly globalized world that appears with many faces, complexities and conflicts, particularly when the discourse referred to it tends to arrange in order of importance the economic hegemony, the dependence and the control of information, ignoring the different stages of development and the socio- political orientations that coexist in the planet.