ADIRA: Anthony Hüseyin

In this edition of the live music series HANE Salon, queer Arab*/SWANA party ADIRA presents interdisciplinary artist Anthony Hüseyin.

Prior to Anthony’s performance, the team of ADIRA Drag Festival 3.0: Who’s Your Diva?!, will share their reflections on the making of the festival. At the heart of this year’s festival is the Mediterranean Diva, bringing together queer Arab, Turkish, Kurdish, Greek, Cypriot, and other East Mediterranean perspectives, and asking: Who becomes a Diva, who gets remembered, and who gets erased?

Hüseyin will then invites the audience into a musical landscape shaped by transformation, memory and resistance. The performance draws on excerpts from Project O, O Biçim Şarkılar / O Shaped Songs, hOpe Shaped Songs and Crime of Passion: works that move between questions of gender, voice, belonging, displacement, freedom and survival.

At the centre of Project O is the Turkish pronoun “O”, which can mean “he”, “she” or “it”. Moving through cycles of childhood, memory and the formation of a nonbinary self, the work treats voice as a spectrum and sound as a space of becoming. Other works turn towards the experience of migration and the fragile construction of belonging, while Crime of Passion confronts the romanticisation of violence and traces the roots of femicide through personal biography, cultural histories and operatic representation.

As with all HANE Salon events, delicious meze plates will be available throughout the evening!

Anthony Hüseyin is a non-binary queer interdisciplinary artist working across music theatre, performance art and contemporary opera. Born in Şanlıurfa, Turkey, they are based in Berlin. Their practice brings together sound, body and social context, drawing on their Kurdish and Arab heritage, classical and jazz training, and an engagement with questions of gender, power, faith and belonging.

ADIRA is a queer Arab*/SWANA party and cultural event series. Founded in 2023 by Hassandra and xanax_attax, ADIRA centers SWANA voices through club nights, drag, and community events. ADIRA celebrates the nostalgia and energy of Arabic-pop music while challenging orientalist narrative.