transkulturalität_mdw 2025
queer trans* culturality
June, 20. and 21, 2025
mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna
Team: Marko Kölbl, Isabel Frey, Hande Sağlam, Lisa Gaupp, Therese Kaufmann
Coordinator: Eva Christina Moreno
moreno-e@mdw.ac.at
T +43 1 71155-3813
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This gathering convenes activists, artists, and researchers from diverse backgrounds to develop queer stances and critiques on transculturality—a concept that interrogates essentialist boundaries of the familiar and the foreign and problematizes the notion of ‘culture’ itself. Building on Queer of Color Critique, which exposes the blank spots in discourses around race within queer theoretical frameworks, we extend this analytical lens to broader contexts involving ethnic minorities, postmigrant communities, and forced migration experiences, particularly through embodied expressions in music, dance or theatre.
Against the backdrop of rising global fascism, the rights of queer and trans people, of ethnic minorities, migrants and refugees face intensifying threats. Paradoxically, while gender and sexual non-conformity face widespread backlash, we simultaneously witness the weaponization of LGBTIQ+ rights advancing racist agendas through homonationalism. Engaging with transculturality through queer and trans* perspectives in performing practices, we open up room for the following themes: forms of queer migrant and postmigrant cultural practice, like (post)migrant club culture; the significance of music and dance for national minorities, like Roma, Croats and Slovenes in Austria; urban and vernacular queer POC cultural expressions from a global viewpoint; the role of performing practices for refugees in navigating racism, resident status, queerness; transcultural understandings of trans*gender expressive culture.
By integrating insights from research, performing arts, music, and activism, we aim to examine how intersections of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and minoritized and racialized difference manifest in practice. Our symposium creates space to share creative responses to these intersections and to develop strategic resistance against the multiple assaults on minority rights within today's authoritarian drift.
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Programme
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Friday, June 20
Bankettsaal
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13:30 |
Welcome Address Ulrike Sych (Rector of mdw) |
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13:45 |
Opening Talk Transpolitical Audiotopias: (Un)doing Gender, Race and Modernity in the Haunted Settler-Colony |
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14:45 |
Refreshment Break |
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15:15 |
Panel Discussion Henrie Dennis (Afro Rainbow Austria), Tonny Africa (Queer Base Vienna, Austria) and Mbongeni Mtshali (University of Cape Town, South Africa) Moderation: Therese Kaufmann |
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16:30 |
Lecture |
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17:30 |
Refreshment Break |
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17:45 |
Panel Discussion Lydia Novak (Kolo Slavuj Vienna, Austria), Marek Michael Konček (Roma Violinist, Bratislava, Slovakia), Lena Kolter (Artist, Performer, Writer, Carinthia/Vienna, Austria) Chair: Marko Kölbl |
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19:15 |
Dinner Break |
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20:15 |
Lecture Performance Stranger in a Strange Land: The Possibilities of Black Music in Jewish Spaces Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell (Interdisciplinary Artist in Yiddish Culture, Atlanta GA, USA) |
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Saturday, June 21
Bankettsaal
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11:00 |
Lecture Queer Trans Culturality in Practice: Negotiating Ambiguous Gender Spaces in Kete Ensembles, Ghana Jason Otoo (University of Cape Coast, Ghana) |
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12:00 |
Duo Talk Trans*sonic Practices: Centering Transgender Perspectives in Music Research and Industry Chair: Therese Kaufmann |
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13:00 |
Break (For Restaurant Recommendations in the Area click here) |
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14:45 |
Film Screening (Art House Kino, Future Art Lab) Wildness (Wu Tsang, USA 2012, 74 min) |
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17:00 |
Queer Postmigrant Rights Tribunal / Performative Proposal Drafting: Queer Postmigrant Club Culture as Intangible Cultural Heritage Impulse: Marko Kölbl Chair: Marko Kölbl and Isabel Frey |
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18:30 |
Dinner Break |
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19:30 |
Artist Talk (Joseph Haydn Hall) Marko Kölbl in Conversation with DŽIPSII (Singer, Beograd, Serbia) |
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20:15 |
Concert (Joseph Haydn Hall) |
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From 22:30 |
Party |
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Event Recommendation Homoriental Party - DJ Yasemin |
Opening Talk
Transpolitical Audiotopias: (un)doing gender, race and modernity in the haunted settler-colony
In Trans-political Audiotopias: (un)doing gender, race and modernity in the haunted settler-colony, Mbongeni Mtshali will explore the tactical appropriation of indigenous black South African music and spirituality to queer political ends. He will focus on how Ntombethongo, a healer and musician, reclaims the inherently trans-political inclination of ubungoma (an indigenous Nguni practice of divining and divination) and subverts the hypermasculine aesthetic codes of maskanda (an indigenous Zulu music) to critique both “traditional” African and western metropolitan gender imperatives, formulating instead a bracingly Afropolitan vision of “queer” black modernity authorised by the very traditions to which it appears so inimical.
Mbongeni Mtshali, director of the Centre for Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of Cape Town, is a performance maker, scholar, artist, and teacher. His research explores black queer/femme performance in South Africa as well as Africa and its diaspora more broadly, with a focus on how black queer/femme subjects use performance tactically to challenge nationally sanctioned repertoires of African respectability, cultural intelligibility and belonging. He has recently turned his attention to tracing queer genealogies of black decolonial world-making across the Caribbean, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean.
Panel Discussion
Sexuality, Expressive Practices and the Refugee Experience in Global Border Regimes
This panel examines how LGBTIQ+ refugees navigate the violent intersections of sexuality, performance, and border control within contemporary asylum regimes. Drawing from art, activism, and academia, our speakers explore how non-normative sexualities and gender expressions become sites of both surveillance and resistance in refugee experiences, particularly across European and African contexts. We interrogate how embodied practices and expressive cultures are rendered legible or illegible within racialized asylum processes, while simultaneously confronting homonationalist discourses that weaponize queer rights to justify exclusionary border policies. Against the backdrop of militarized borders and rising authoritarianism, this discussion reveals how expressive practices become contested terrains where refugees must navigate racist Othering, queerphobic violence, and the paradoxical logics of inclusion and exclusion that operate through intersections of race and sexuality.
Henrie Dennis is a Nigerian-born human rights advocate, art curator, academic researcher, and cultural mediator, committed to promoting the rights and dignity of LGBTIQ+ individuals of African descent. She is also the founder of Afro Rainbow Austria. Her work engages with critical themes such as queerness, migration, equitable resource distribution, gender, anti-racism, and decolonization, contributing to ongoing conversations around social justice and inclusion.
Mbongeni Mtshali is a performance maker, scholar, artist, and teacher. His research explores black queer/femme performance in South Africa as well as Africa and its diaspora more broadly, with a focus on how black queer/femme subjects use performance tactically to challenge nationally sanctioned repertoires of African respectability, cultural intelligibility and belonging. He has recently turned his attention to tracing queer genealogies of black decolonial world-making across the Caribbean, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean.
Tonny Africa is an Ugandan dance artist, choreographer, activist and performance maker and part of the Vienna-based NGO Queer Base that offers support for LGBTIQ+ refugees. Their practice is predominantly developed in dance, theatre and performance art, deeply rooted at the intersection of art and activism as a tool of community empowerment, intervention and engagement
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Lecture
Cruising a State of Abjection: Ambivalent Musical Performance of Queer Worldmaking in Northern Cyprus
With the performative turn in political science and international relations, de facto states have become emblematic sites for examining how political phenomena are performatively constituted. Yet this focus has largely overlooked their artistic performance cultures, especially queer and minoritarian ones. This presentation offers one of the first critical analyses of performance and politics in the Turkish Federated State of Cyprus (TFSC) and of queer performance in Northern Cyprus more broadly. It focuses on a 1983 music video created for TFSC public television by Ferdi Özbeğen — a queer singer of Armenian and Cretan Muslim heritage from Turkey — and Nil Burak, a Turkish Cypriot pop star, actor, and “fag hag” extraordinaire. Set at the Kyrenia port, the video adopts a camp-inflected aesthetics of cruising to explore the queer ontology of de facto statehood and the possibility of disoriented worldmaking. This case study demonstrates how de facto states and their patron states engaged in queer diplomatic performance well before the emergence of sexual rights as a domain of international relations. Rather than an uncompromising investment in liberatory or progressive goals, the video’s ambivalent politics mobilize pleasure and hope in ways that reinscribe and aestheticize hegemonic power dynamics.
Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay is Associate Professor of Performing Arts and founding director of the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Performance and Politics in the Department of Cultural and Environmental Heritage at the University of Milan. Ertuğ’s primary research areas include minoritarian theatre cultures; feminist and queer media, performance, and literature; theories of performance and performativity; critical archival studies; and the cultural history of Turkey. He currently serves as the principal investigator of three research projects: Staging National Abjection: Theatre and Politics in Turkey and Its Diasporas (European Research Council Starting Grant); Negotiating Abjection: Performance and Politics Among Turkey’s Diasporas in Lombardy (Cariplo Foundation); and Archives of Abjection: Minoritarian Cultural Production in Turkey and Its Diasporas (Next Generation EU Program). Ertuğ is also a dramatic translator, dramaturg, and playwright.
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Panel Discussion:
Queerness and Identity-laden - Cultural Expression within ‘National Minorities‘ in Central and Eastern Europe
Ethnic minorities – often framed as “national minorities” or “autochthonous ethnic groups” – within European nation states often enjoy specific rights, acknowledged legal status and designated cultural funding. Within these groups, often struggling with upholding their ethnic identity within a majority society, queer positions tend to be marginal. Lesbian, gay, and bi, inter and trans as well as non-binary and queer minority members often do not express their sexual or gender identity freely within the cultural expressive realms of these minority communities. This is often related to the conservative or rather conserving attitudes towards cultural expressions. But even in popular culture within minoritarian spaces, queerness stays marginal, as it seems to be understood as a deviation from a monolithic ethnic identity. This panel seeks to critically question these dynamics, asks for queer minority members lived experiences, and seeks forms and ways of relating queerness and ethnic minority identities in music and dance.
Lena Kolter is an artist, musician, performer, writer and co-founder of the Noreia String Quartet and lives and works in Carinthia and Vienna. They combine art and social criticism, music and activism and aim to address important socio-political issues and incorporate them into their artistic work. Kolter focuses on the networking and the intersection of different artistic fields, from performance to music to poetry. In 2022, Kolter received the Förderpreis des Landes Kärnten for Music. In 2025 they published their first poetry book titled verschlaufte zeit ali s časom se celo čas obrne and are now conducting nationwide performances.
Lydia/Lidija Novak was born in Beč/Vienna and is Burgenland-Croatian Viennese. Novak studied theater, film and media studies, comparative literature and Austrian studies in Vienna. For many years she has been involved in various ethnic group organizations, since 2010 part of the artistic direction of the folklore ensemble Kolo Slavuj. She writes multilingually on, in and about language, culture, film and theater. Novak brings years of work in theater and cinema, as well as freelance work in various media projects since 2020, including as editor of the magazine Novi glas and the (Burgenland-) Croatian podcast centar.melange. Since 2023 Novak is working as production manager at the Carinthian Summer Festival.
Marek Michael Konček is a Slovak Roma violinist. He graduated from the Academy of Performing Arts Banska Bystrica (SK) and the Academy of Music in Krakow (PL). His Roma roots and traditions of folk music in his family were the most important point in his performance style, which combines both ethnic and classical music. Today he participates at various projects in Slovakia and abroad and cooperates with Slovak National Theatre. As an arranger and composer, he promotes traditional style in a professional and progressive way, making this art available to a wider audience. As a member of LGBTQ+ community Konček participates at various Queer projects in Slovakia.
Lecture Performance
Stranger in a Strange Land: The Possibilities of Black Music in Jewish Spaces
Music of the African diaspora remains a consistently influential element of contemporary arts and culture. Even so, does that necessarily mean it has a place in spaces of Jewish prayer and culture? Is it possible without tokenizing, appropriation or theological issues? And — how are the meaningfully historic narratives of the African and the Jewish diasporas complicated, trebled or enriched when embodied by the Black queer performer? In this session, through conversation and music, we will attempt to find out.
Anthony Russell is interdisciplinary artist working in Yiddish culture. His album Convergence, with klezmer trio Veretski Pass, is an exploration of a century of African American and Ashkenazi Jewish music. Kosmopolitn, his recent release with Dmitri Gaskin, features their original settings of Yiddish modernist poetry for string ensemble. An inaurgual Mandel Institute Cultural Leadership Fellow (2023-25) Anthony has expanded his work into cultural activism through collaboration with the Workers Circle and as an essayist in a number of publications, including The Forward, Tablet Magazine, JTA, PROTOCOLS, Ayin Press and Jewish Currents.
Lecture
Queer Trans Culturality in Practice: Negotiating Ambiguous Gender Spaces in Kete Ensembles, Ghana
Exploring Queer Trans Culturality, this lecture focuses on male cross-dressing performers (Kete Kojo Mbesiafo) in Ghana’s Akan Kete dance. Ethnographic fieldwork with eleven practitioners addresses: (1) Manifestations of gender roles within ensembles employing cross-dressers; (2) Performers' own meanings attached to their roles. Framed by Ekins’ Male-Femaling Theory (categorizing gender strategies) and Butler’s Gender Performativity (showing subversion of norms through performance elements), the research also incorporates an Ubuntu perspective on communal meaning-making. Findings reveal a “gender-ambiguous” position: performers lead female costuming/tasks yet are excluded from male rituals/decisions, generating complex power dynamics regarding labor, space, and payment. Performers frame their embodied cross-dressing as acts of creative agency for social critique, economic gain, ritual purpose, and innovation, identifying as “heat-bringers” who provoke audience curiosity, generosity, and homophobia. By centering first-person narratives, this study demonstrates how queer-trans performers negotiate both continuity and transformation within deep-rooted cultural forms, modeling cultural evolution that honors tradition while embracing gender multiplicity.
Jason Otoo is a cultural practitioner and final-year DAAD-funded PhD candidate in Ethnomusicology at the University of Hildesheim. His research critically examines male cross-dressing and non-conforming gender expressions within Ghanaian Akan Kete dance. He holds an MPhil in Ethnomusicology (University of Cape Coast) and leads Ghana’s National Commission on Culture’s Literary & Performing Arts Department, actively advocating for gender inclusion. As CEO of Odikro Royals Dance Company, he choreographs national events. His recent work, presented at the Global Arts Festival (Ohio), highlights the lived realities of gender non-conforming performers in heteronormative traditional contexts.
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Duo Talk
Trans*sonic Practices: Centering Transgender Perspectives in Music Research and Industry
This duo conversation brings together Saeleen Bouvar, founder of the Transtronica festival, an electronic music festival in Hamburg featuring an all-trans lineup, and Ilgaz Yalçınoğlu, a Berlin-based music researcher whose research is informed by trans theories. Together, they will reflect on both scholarly and curatorial approaches that center trans voices, exploring how trans* as a method can reshape methodologies in music research and challenge structural exclusions in artistic and cultural production. Drawing from their practices, they will discuss the politics of sonic representation and the potentials of trans-led curation.
Ilgaz Yalçınoğlu is a music researcher, radio host and promoter based in Berlin. He is a PhD candidate in musicology at Humboldt University of Berlin and a pre-doctoral researcher in the Emmy Noether Research Group Sound System Epistemologies: Knowledge Engendered through Practice. Ilgaz is part of Kudur, a trans/queer BIPOC-led music and performance series in Berlin.
Saeleen Bouvar is an artist, activist, and musician who has shaped Hamburg’s queer club culture through trans* visibility. Since founding Salon Queertronique in 2017, she has created spaces where music, history, and community merge. Guided by her motto Recreate–Restore–Reform she blends the sounds of historic queer clubs with contemporary beats. Her sets span disco, acid house, and techno, marked by refined femininity. As the founder of Transtronica — the world’s first festival with an all-trans lineup and a focus on trans femininity — Bouvar stands at the forefront of cultural innovation, celebrating trans* artistry and creating spaces of joy, resistance, and visibility.
Film Screening
Wildness (Wu Tsang, USA 2021, 74min)
In this documentary portrait, the Silver Platter voices and whispers, unfolding its story — and with it, the movements of the communities and contexts living through, around, and within it. Opened in 1963, the Silver Platter is the oldest gay bar in Los Angeles’s MacArthur Park area, originally catering primarily to the Latinx immigrant and queer community. The dynamics of space and negotiation shift when a group of young artists initiates a weekly performance art and dance party called Wildness (organized by director Wu Tsang and DJs NGUZUNGUZU and Total Freedom). Desires and urgencies around community and safety, movement and night, expression and gathering are renegotiated, as the bar holds space for fabulous alliance, solidaric coalition, and glamorous failure.
Djamila Codou Anges Grandits is a Vienna-based curator and film programmer. She is part of CineCollective and D—Arts. Since 2022, she has been part of the Berlinale Panorama pre-selection committee. From 2021 to 2025, she was involved in the non-fiction funding commission of the Zürcher Filmstiftung. Between 2019 and 2024, she co-led the collective artistic direction and management of Kaleidoskop – Film und Freiluft am Karlsplatz. Since 2020, she has contributed to the programming and selection processes of various international film festivals, including DOK Leipzig, Diagonale, Kasseler Dokfest, and Tricky Women – Tricky Realities. In 2024, she co-curated the exhibition coded manoeuvres_sticky webs at Belvedere 21, Vienna, as part of the CIVA Festival for contemporary immersive visual art.
She has lectured across programmes at the University of Applied Arts, the Academy of Fine Arts, and the Film Academy at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, engaging with questions of institutional responsibility, moving image, and collective practice. Djamila works as a moderator and as a strategic and dramaturgical consultant. Her practice is grounded in care for entanglements and collective movements.
Performative Proposal Drafting / Queer Postmigrant Rights Tribunal
Queer Postmigrant Club Culture as Intangible Cultural Heritage
In bigger cities of German-speaking Europe, like Vienna or Berlin, club culture formats targeting queer and migrant positionalities are thriving. Shaped by various forms of migration, especially the labor migration from Turkey and former Yugoslav countries – diasporic cultural expressions are constitutive of postmigrant societies in Austria and Germany. Queer positions have a history therein and are flourishing, especially in relation to festivities, partying, and clubbing.
This “postmigrant queer rights tribunal” seeks to formulate queer postmigrant claims of structural support and visibility. In the form of a performative proposal drafting, representatives of queer transcultural club spaces, explore the possibilities of political and cultural recognition. The fictitious goal of this tribunal is the inscription of “queer postmigrant club culture” to the national inventory of intangible cultural heritage of the Austrian UNESCO commission. While this format is supposed to serve as a joyful mimicking of cultural policy structures, its actual effects might not be inconsequential: a real-life application and potential inscription into the ICH inventory of Austria.
Ari Kozanoğlu is a queer, Turkey-born Armenian cultural producer, curator, and DJ based in Berlin. With a background in Cultural Studies and a focus on queer kinship, he is the co-founder of Kudur, a trans/queer BIPOC-led music and performance series. His work bridges nightlife, artistic production, and community care—creating safer, celebratory spaces for underrepresented voices across Europe.
Ioannis Christidis is an ethnomusicologist with musical background in piano and Middle Eastern oud. He holds a PhD in ethnomusicology with a dissertation on the role of music in the lives of Syrian forced migrants in Europe. Christidis’ research interests have since expanded to include electronic popular music and nightlife cultures among SWANA migrant-minorities in Europe, sacred soundscapes in post-migrant contexts, and multilingual music genres and performance contexts.
Klara Koštal is a cultural manager, researcher and policy expert, focusing on cultural policymaking from a feminist, inclusive and anti-discriminatory viewpoint. She studied comparative literature, cultural management, and political and communication sciences at the University of Vienna and King’s College London. She has held various positions in the culture sector and currently works as a policy officer for the UNESCO Convention on the Diversity of Cultural Expressions at the Austrian Commission for UNESCO. She is expert author at the Compendium of Cultural Policies and Trends.
Marko Kölbl is a musician, dancer and ethnomusicologist working on music and dance of Austrian minorities and migrant communities, especially of Burgenland Croats and in relation the Afghan refugee experience. Marko is director of the department of Folk Music Research and Ethnomusicology at mdw, chair of the Study Group on Gender and Sexuality of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance. He is also a member of the advisory committee on intangible cultural heritage of the Austrian UNESCO commission.
Sabine Schwaighofer, born in Salzburg in 1969, lives and works in Vienna since 1991. Schwaighofer is active as DJ (DJ Yasemin) since 1987, focusing on South-Eastern European and Middle Eastern sounds. In 1999, she founded the queer club Homoriental, in Vienna – one of the first queer parties addressing an audience with migratory experiences and/or interested in “Oriental“ music. Schwaighofer is also a visual artist, using the medium of photography and works for the NGO Initiative Minderheiten (minorities initiative).
Sabrina Anderson, born as Rene Jovanović with Croatian, Serbian, Roma and Slovak roots, came to Vienna as a four-year-old as a child of guest workers. She attended the graphic arts school and fashion school in Vienna,and finished a hairdressing apprenticeship. Artistically, she worked as a travelling drag artist with a drag company. A self-declared 'Viennese with migrant background', Sabrina discovered the World of queer migrant night life through Homoriental and inspired by it, she founded Ballcancan, a queer Balkan clubbing, focusing on Ex-Yu popular music for a queer audience.
Artist Talk and Concert
DŽIPSII
Jovan Živadinović, known as Džipsii, is a Serbian pop and R&B artist, singer-songwriter, and performer born on January 20. 2000 in Zaječar, Serbia. He showed a passion for music and performance from a young age, beginning his artistic journey through dance, where he won several national awards. During high school, he joined Music and Drama Lab, where he further developed his skills and love for performance. After high school, Džipsii focused on music, recording early demos with local producers before moving to Belgrade in 2021. There, he began working with producer Rap Gorilla and released his debut single Sve je isto, followed by Finibrid. In 2022, he got signed by the record label Red Pill Productions and released his first album, Zapisi iz podzemlja, which received critical acclaim and was ranked among the best Serbian albums of the year. In 2023, Džipsii gained national attention as a finalist at Serbia’s Eurovision selection with the song Greh. Known for blending underground sounds with pop and R&B influences, his work is marked by emotional depth and a distinctive artistic identity. Openly Roma and gay, he is also one of the few artists in Serbia speaking openly about his identity, using his platform to advocate for inclusion and representation in the arts.
Party at Spektakel Vienna
Curated by Kudur
Kudur is a music and performance-focused event series organized by trans/queer PoC members of the Berlin-based collective of the same name, founded in 2022. Rooted in a shared love for Turkish pop and a deep appreciation of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean musical cultures, Kudur draws inspiration from the rich cultural history of the Mediterranean. Kudur's mission is to create spaces for its community and preserve musical roots. For the closing party of queer trans* culturality, Kudur residents DJ Ay Ay Ay and DJ Zagili bring their signature high-energy set of Turkish pop gems to Vienna for the first time. The curators of the party are Ilgaz Yalçınoğlu and Ari Kozanoğlu.