Göksu Kunak »Double Dribble / Grand Jeté«

»Double Dribble / Grand Jeté« is a performative reading that follows stories around basketball in the life and imagination of Göksu Kunak. Moving between the basketball court, the ballet studio, and the paternal gaze of Baba, the performance examines how bodies learn discipline through technique, repetition, and spectatorship. Ballet appears not as beauty, but as a coded system of control: alignment, posture, endurance, lightness, and the constant demand to hide effort. Basketball and ballet initially appear as opposites, yet slowly reveal the same infrastructure of training, exhaustion, elegance, and pain.

Drawing from Roland Barthes and his writing on spectacle and gesture, the work treats sport and dance as theatrical systems governed by rules and mythologies. Through slowed time, amplified breath, and repeated gestures, the performance exposes the violence hidden inside ideals of grace, control, and perfection.

Göksu Kunak lives in Berlin and works across performance, text, installation, and moving image. Born in Turkey, the non-binary artist combines queer and intersectional perspectives with references to Arabesk culture, body politics, and memory. In Kunak’s work, performance becomes a space in which social choreographies are made visible and alternative forms of desire, temporality, and coexistence can be explored. In 2025, Göksu Kunak was awarded the »Berlin Art Prize«.