Samet Durgun Photographer
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Emerging Queer Artists Worldwide

Journal · Field guide · Updated October 2026

Queer artists early in their careers across six continents, working in sculpture, performance, film, sound, drag and writing on migration, faith and the body.

I’m Samet Durgun, a photographer in Berlin. I made Come Get Your Honey with queer, trans and gender-nonconforming refugees and asylum seekers in this city, and in these guides I gather the photographers and artists working near the same questions.Full statement, biography and CV → Field guides →

The photography guide covers my own medium. Here I cover what queer artists early in their careers are doing in everything else (sculpture, performance, film, sound, drag, writing, craft, fashion) across six continents, on migration, family, faith, land and the body.

I know almost none of these people personally; I built this map by watching the field, not from a set of relationships. I’ve leaned on artists a museum, prize body, funder or residency has itself called emerging or early-career, because that’s the only way I could be reasonably sure a claim about someone’s work, or about how they identify, actually holds up before I put it on my own site. A good number of names I started with didn’t survive that test and I’ve left them out because I couldn’t stand behind the specific claim in the time I had, which says nothing about the work itself.

At a glance

Artist Based Key work Medium
Onur Karaoğlu Berlin, from Turkey Light Theory Film, video, performance
Ashkan Shabani Germany, from Iran Queer, Life, Freedom Installation, photography, video, text
Kasra Jalilipour United Kingdom, from Iran Gut Feelings 2.0 Installation, performance, writing
Mahsa Salali United Kingdom, from Iran THE CALL – MUBĀH مُباح Durational performance
Camila Flores-Fernández Berlin, from Peru We Are Here Video, documentary, participatory art
Logan February Berlin, from Nigeria DAAD fellowship; Berliner Festspiele Poetry, multidisciplinary
Eda Phanlert Sriprom Berlin, from Thailand Monk-robe sculpture Textile sculpture
Arafa C. Hamadi Tanzania / Kenya Zeitz MOCAA fellowship work Architecture, installation, VR, moving image
Oat Montien Bangkok, Thailand Country Home Sheriff Sculpture, video, installation, performance
Artur Ferreira São Paulo, Brazil Museu Nacional de Belas Artes collection work Painting, drawing, sculpture
Maxi Mamani (Bartolina Xixa) Jujuy, Argentina Bartolina Xixa Dance, drag, performance
Alexis Lima Barcelona Sidario Performance, art direction
Katherine Bahena-Benitez United States JOTA Theatre, poetry, directing
RIDIKKULUZ New York Keffiyeh Kurlz Painting, multidisciplinary
abdu mongo ali Baltimore between every breath, there is atmosphere Music, poetry, video, performance
Roza Nozari Canada All the Parts We Exile Literature
Jack Ball Sydney, Australia Heavy Grit Installation, photography, sculpture
Sione Monū Aotearoa / Australia ’Ao kakala Moving image, adornment, performance
Erik Yvon Melbourne, from Mauritius Aura orchid doudou Fashion design
Samet Durgun Berlin Come Get Your Honey Photography

Berlin and London, arrived from elsewhere

These are the nearest neighbours to my own situation, artists who came to a city from somewhere else and made that arrival material, in media I don’t work in.

Onur Karaoğlu Berlin, from Turkey
A 2025–26 nGbK Weltoffenes Berlin fellow, working across film, video and performance with archival, personal and fictional material combined. In nGbK's own description, the work looks at forced integration "from a queer perspective," turning daily life into political symbol. His early film Light Theory premiered in Istanbul in 2018.
Ashkan Shabani Germany, from Iran
This is the one entry here where displacement is named outright, in his own words. His site describes him as a queer asylum seeker, and a Der Greif interview quotes him calling himself "queer, foreign, and a refugee." Queer, Life, Freedom, shown at Kampnagel, Hamburg in October 2025, works in installation, photography, video and text through the route from Iran through Turkey to Germany, as he and the venue both state it.
Kasra Jalilipour United Kingdom, from Iran
Based in Derbyshire, born in Esfahan in 1995. Gut Feelings 2.0, at Grand Union, Birmingham in 2025, is described by the gallery as their first large-scale exhibition. It brings together sculpture, works on paper, moving image and live performance, built from research into queer and trans lives in nineteenth-century Iran, deliberately left out of the historical record.
Mahsa Salali United Kingdom, from Iran
Born in Iran, she immigrated to the UK at eighteen. Selected for the Whitechapel Gallery's London Open Live 2025, she stood motionless for hours bearing twenty kilograms of chain tied to seven double bassists in THE CALL – MUBĀH مُباح, a durational performance built from research into modesty, femicide and the female-presenting body under religious constraint.
Camila Flores-Fernández Berlin, from Peru
Born in Lima in 1996, she describes herself, in words published by a Bremen residency, as "a Berlin-based Peruvian queer artist." We Are Here (2023), on queer refugees dealing with immigration and urban space in Brussels, won the A-PLACE Video Production Open Call and showed in Barcelona. A newer project, still a working title, took her back into the same visual-ethnography method at a Bremen residency in late 2025.
Logan February Berlin, from Nigeria
Born in Anambra in 1999, non-binary, they/them. A 2024 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin literature fellow and 2025 Humboldt Forum poet-in-residence, reading at Berliner Festspiele in September 2026. DAAD's own essay quotes them naming an "inherent queerness of tradition" and claiming "the right to a queer life in Nigeria," poetry built from Yorùbá myth and psycho-spiritual imagery.
Eda Phanlert Sriprom Berlin, from Thailand
Born in Surin, and in her own words to LE MILE Magazine, she is "a Trans and a Trans artist" who has "been facing the identity challenge toward the society." At the Schwules Museum's Young Birds from Strange Mountains (2024–25), a work made from discarded Buddhist monk robes and PET bottles became a sculpture. Discarded material of faith is remade there, not argued with.

Africa and Asia

There are two entries here, on purpose. One is work building the rooms in which queer work can exist at all, and the other is a practice in a register the photography guide doesn’t touch.

Arafa C. Hamadi Tanzania / Kenya
Non-binary, in their own words on a residency bio: "Hello, I'm Arafa. I am a non-binary artist." A 2025 Zeitz MOCAA fellow working across architecture, installation, VR and moving image, with East African ballroom life and community space as recurring ground. Hamadi also co-directs ALTÆR, an alternative event space in Dar es Salaam built around the safety of marginalised attendees, as the institutions that document it describe it.
Oat Montien Bangkok, Thailand
His BDSM alter ego, "Gay Asian Cowboy," was, in his own words to Berlin Art Link, "birthed from grief" after his father's death in 2023. Country Home Sheriff, at JWD Art Space, Bangkok in 2024, and a related showing at the Schwules Museum's Young Birds from Strange Mountains, bind his father's cowboy-bar wardrobe into sculptural and shibari-inflected objects; "this represents the body of my dad," he says. A 2022 Tom of Finland Foundation residency runs alongside it.

Latin America and diaspora

Artur Ferreira São Paulo, Brazil
Born in Porto Alegre in 1999, now a master's student in visual poetics at USP. His gallery, Luciana Caravello, frames the paintings as exploring "queer visuality". His own bio makes no such claim, so take that as the gallery's reading, not his. A work already sits in the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes collection; a solo show, O Quarto de Gitão, opened at Fundação Ecarta in 2023.
Maxi Mamani (Bartolina Xixa) Jujuy, Argentina
Queer in his own words: "pensarme como marica es una decisión y una identidad política," he has said. Bartolina Xixa, the drag persona named for an eighteenth-century Aymara anti-colonial leader, isn't a separate self from Maxi Mamani; he rejects that binary directly. Invited to the 11th Berlin Biennale in 2020 with the video Ramita Seca and a new piece, Los Funerales de Bartolina Xixa.
Alexis Lima Barcelona
Sidario, a 2025 performance with Wynnie Mynerva at MACBA, Barcelona, took its cue from Pedro Lemebel: Lima, dressed in white, drew Wynnie's blood and imprinted it on a shroud, inside a programme on HIV, precarity and the social body that MACBA itself frames as queer. Co-conceived and directed the piece.
Katherine Bahena-Benitez United States (Stockton, California / bicoastal New York–California)
Born and raised in Stockton; three independent institutions (the California Arts Council, The Tank in New York, and Oberlin College) describe her as a queer Mexican Indigenous artist. JOTA, her solo piece, follows a young queer Mexican Indigenous woman preparing to leave home; it debuted with Teatro Espejo in June 2025, and a state grant is bringing it back to Stockton.

North America and diaspora

RIDIKKULUZ New York
Of Palestinian, Egyptian and Jordanian heritage, and in their own words to Tenz Magazine, "a queer arab" and a "gay Arab man." A 2025 Queer|Art fellow, working across painting, sculpture, performance and writing to hold family and chosen family together instead of against each other, through religious and decolonial questions. Keffiyeh Kurlz (2022) is one named piece; a second, [minna | منا] of us, they co-curated at Participant Inc.
abdu mongo ali Baltimore
Self-describes, on their own site, as a Black queer artist, they/them. The Baltimore Museum of Art's inaugural Alice and Franklin Cooley Composer in Residence, September 2025 to January 2026: between every breath, there is atmosphere, a sound work drawn from poems on Blackness, gay life and the afterlives of slavery, deconstructing binary ideas of race, gender and sexuality along the way.
Roza Nozari Canada; her parents emigrated from Iran
Born in Canada. Won the 2025 Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers (the prize's own early-career definition) for the memoir All the Parts We Exile (Knopf Canada). The jury called it a book that "captivates with its raw portrait of the yearning to be oneself," which traces her queer identity alongside her family's Iranian heritage.

Aotearoa, Australia and the Pacific

Several institutions here fund LGBTQIA+ and MVPFAFF+ Pacific practice by name, which is why the career-stage evidence is cleaner than almost anywhere else on this map.

Jack Ball Sydney, Australia
They/he, on their own site. Winner of the 2025 Ramsay Art Prize (A$100,000, acquisitive, restricted to Australian artists under forty) for Heavy Grit, made of suspended inkjet prints, stained glass, beeswax, charcoal, copper pipe, fabric and rope, developed from scrapbooks held by the Australian Queer Archives and now in the Art Gallery of South Australia's permanent collection.
Sione Monū Aotearoa / Australia
Winner of Creative New Zealand's 2024 Emerging Pacific Artist Award. 'Ao kakala (2021), plastic flowers, foam board and beads, commissioned for Te Tuhi's The Inner Lives of Islands, was read by one reviewer as exploring gender's fluidity through its own form.
Erik Yvon Melbourne, Australia, from Mauritius
Moved to Australia at nineteen after growing up in Mauritius. The National Gallery of Victoria calls him an emerging fashion designer. In his own words to Fashion Journal, the label draws on "my origins on the island of Mauritius" and "my experiences as a queer person of colour" to unmake femininity and masculinity as fixed categories, as in Aura orchid doudou (2022) and the Mo libre installation, Melbourne Fashion Week.

Where mine sits

Samet Durgun Berlin
I'm one entry among these, not a special case inside them. I'm a first-generation immigrant in Berlin since 2013, and on the record: I am not a refugee, and I am not an asylum seeker. Nearly fifty people took part in Come Get Your Honey; around fifteen of them are portrayed in the series, among photographs of the city.

Within this guide, I think I’m the only one whose central subject is queer refugees and asylum seekers in one city, photographed through friendship over years. Outside my own medium, the nearest neighbours I can name are Hamadi’s rooms built for queer occupancy, Montien’s shibari-bound inheritance, and Monū’s plastic-and-foam remaking of gendered form. None of us are doing the same thing, but none of the three needs a trauma story to hold together. That’s the bar I try to hold mine to as well.

The full Come Get Your Honey series is online. My own medium belongs with the emerging queer photographers worldwide. All eleven field guides map the wider field together.

Sources

Where the claims above come from. Where an artist has their own site, their name links to it.

← Field guides