Istanbul Queer Art Collective (IQAC) and Dr Lizzie Stewart, Senior Lecturer in Modern Languages, Culture and Society, performed an homage to the work of Virginia Woolf on 16 May.
The performance weaved together quotations from a range of Woolf’s works, including her letters to Vita, her diaries, Orlando, The Waves, To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, short stories such as 'Moments of Being', and essays such as 'Street Haunting: A London Adventure'. Using repetition and layering, the performance offered an experimental reading of both literature and history.
Their style connects to a Dada and Fluxus inspired approach to artmaking, where the performers playfully responded to the statue as a found object, and to what Jack Halberstam calls the “queer art of failure” and what Renate Lorenz calls “radical drag”.
The majority of our performances make use of quotations in one way or the other. In using other people’s words to express ourselves is a form of “possession” and “speaking in tongues”, that acknowledges the fact that as migrant artists we are using a second language, a culture that is a “found object” rather than our own and that “individual” minds are always already “collective”: a collage of a multitude of other voices.
Tuna Erdem, Istanbul Queer Art Collective (IQAC)
At first, audience members may feel like the performance is an “estrangement” to the way texts are normally read. However, IQAC believe they are presenting the actual experience of reading texts – being struck by and stuck at certain phrases, underlining certain sentences, going back to them further along the line, being reminded of them during our daily life, and discovering new interpretations in repetition. It is a form of close reading in the style of a performance.
IQAC always performs in drag, but in this performance it had an added resonance. Woolf’s diaries attest that she had a lifelong love/hate relationship to clothes – forever afraid to be ridiculed for her choice of clothes, regarding the buying of clothes as the symbol of everything that is wrong in the world. The performers’ intentionally ridiculous clothes resonated with this background, unearthing the absurd that is inherent in all aspects of gender.
As a durational performance, attendees were invited to come and go throughout the event.
I didn’t really know what to expect beforehand, but I found it highly thought-provoking, meditative and witty in equal measure.
Audience member
The whole show was moving, funny and beguiling. When I got home, I had a niçoise for supper, with a lot of anchovies…
Audience member
The event was supported by the Faculty of Arts & Humanities Dean’s Opportunity Fund in collaboration with the Department of English and Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures.
The statue, created by sculptor Eleanor Crook, will be moving to the University of Sussex in summer 2025.
It has been such an honour to work in the Virginia Woolf Building, named following the discovery of Woolf’s studies in History, Greek, Latin and German at King’s as a teenager. While it is sad that we will lose the building name, Lizzie Stewart and Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergul of the Istanbul Queer Art Collective provided us with such a creative and moving performance to mark our departure. Hearing the polyphonic voicing of Woolf’s words echoing through the building foyer, and around the statue of Wax Virginia, was a mesmerising and unforgettable experience.
Professor Anna Snaith, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature
