Samet Durgun Photographer
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Queer Artists From and Based in Germany

Journal · Field guide · Updated October 2026

Queer artists from and based in Germany in painting, performance, film and the novel. This is the lineage beyond photography, from Weimar Berlin to now.

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 →

This is the wider lineage beyond photography, in painting, performance, film, the novel, and one gallery a group of painters ran themselves. Photography already has its own guide. What’s left once you take that away runs from Weimar Berlin to Austria’s pavilion at the 2026 Venice Biennale. I started with eighteen names and kept the ten I could hold up against an institution’s own page, not a blog or a copied press release. A couple of people who looked solid going in didn’t, and I’ve left them out. Where someone hasn’t said how they identify, I describe what they made and stop, or say whose description I’m passing on.

At a glance

Artist Based Key work Ground
Rainer Fetting Berlin Erstes Mauerbild, 1977 Public scale, not autobiography
Salomé Berlin Transformer Company The body as the material
Henrik Olesen Berlin Some Gay-Lesbian Artists…, 2007 The archive reread for erasure
Samet Durgun Berlin Come Get Your Honey Relationship; queerness as the ground
Florentina Holzinger Berlin / Vienna SEAWORLD VENICE, 2026 The stage undone, work only
Tucké Royale Berlin Neubau, 2020 A trans story outside the metropolis
Kim de l’Horizon Zürich Blutbuch, 2022 Grammar broken at the sentence
Jeanne Mammen 1890–1976 Bilitis lithographs, c. 1930–32 Attention instead of caricature
Audre Lorde 1934–1992 Sister Outsider, 1984 Self-described; a bridge into Berlin
Kutluğ Ataman Istanbul / London / Barcelona Lola + Bilidikid, 1998 One film, work only

Making the claim in public

A self-run gallery in a divided city, and the painter’s own body in it.

Rainer Fetting Berlin
Co-founded Galerie am Moritzplatz in 1977, a self-run space in West Berlin. Sources disagree on the exact roster, though Fetting and Salomé recur across all of them, with Middendorf named in most. His first Wall painting, Erstes Mauerbild, now hangs in the Städel. Homosexuality recurs across the work, most directly in the eroticism institutions describe in Figure at the Wall. Based in Berlin since then.
Salomé Berlin
Co-founded Galerie am Moritzplatz with Fetting and others in 1977, then folded performance into painting himself as one half of Transformer Company, a drag duo with Rolf von Bergmann, subverting gender constructs through joint performance as much as through the paintings. Based in Berlin since 1998.

Reading the record against itself

Two ways of answering the same problem: the record leaves people like you out, or it gets built from inside a relationship instead of from outside one.

Henrik Olesen Berlin
Some Gay-Lesbian Artists and/or Artists relevant to Homo-Social Culture Born between c. 1300–1870, at the Migros Museum in Zürich in 2007, rereads art history's archive for what it left out. How do I make myself a body?, shown at Galerie Buchholz in Berlin, treats Alan Turing as what the gallery calls "a phantom subject" of the record. MoMA gave him his first U.S. solo museum show, Projects 94, in 2011. Born 1967 in Denmark, based in Berlin.
Samet Durgun Berlin
My Come Get Your Honey, 2018–, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2021, with a voice recording and a video bound into the book. Nearly fifty people took part; around fifteen of them are portrayed in the series, among photographs of the city itself. I'm a first-generation immigrant, German-Turkish-Abkhazian, and on record: not a refugee, and not an asylum seeker.

The body on stage

Two ways the stage stops being a place where gender is performed and becomes a place where it is taken apart.

Florentina Holzinger Berlin / Vienna
SEAWORLD VENICE represents Austria at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026, curated by Nora-Swantje Almes. It takes apart ballet convention and religious iconography using acrobats, stuntwomen and piercers instead of dancers alone. TANZ (2019) and SANCTA (2024) worked the same way, redistributing risk as competence and offering nudity as labour instead of to a gaze. Critics have read the practice through queer feminist theory.
Tucké Royale Berlin
Wrote and starred in Neubau (2020), whose protagonist Markus is a trans man dividing his time between Berlin's queer community and the grandmothers who raised him in the rural Uckermark. Royale has said he wrote the part because he never expected to be offered one like it. Trained in puppet theatre at the Ernst Busch Academy. One of the actors who signed the #ActOut manifesto in SZ-Magazin, February 2021, as a signatory, not an organiser.

The sentence itself

What Olesen does to the archive and Holzinger to the stage, done to German grammar.

Kim de l'Horizon Zürich
Blutbuch won the German Book Prize in 2022 (€25,000) for a novel whose non-binary narrator searches for a language of their own, per the jury. Based in Zürich, not Germany; I've included them for the prize itself, awarded in German by the Börsenverein, not for an address. Institutions that work with them, including the Schauspielhaus Zürich, write their biography in they/them throughout. I found no quote in Kim de l'Horizon's own words stating that pronoun, so I'm reporting how others already describe them, not adding a claim of mine.

One who came before

Jeanne Mammen 1890–1976
Her Bilitis lithographs, made around 1930–32 for Pierre Louÿs's poems, were never published, banned by the Nazi press in 1933. First solo show at Galerie Gurlitt, 1930. After 1933, the publications she worked for were banned and she stopped exhibiting, which MoMA calls "inner emigration." I've included her for what the lithographs saw in Weimar Berlin's lesbian bars, with attention instead of caricature.

Where the wider lineage touches Berlin

The world canon is a different piece. Two names from it pass through this city and I’d rather say how.

Audre Lorde 1934–1992
Guest professor at the Freie Universität Berlin's John F. Kennedy Institute from 1984, in what the Institute calls the last eight years of her life, years it credits with helping shape the beginnings of the Afro-German movement. Zami (1982) and Sister Outsider (1984) were already written by then. She described herself, across her speeches and essays, as a Black lesbian feminist, mother, warrior and poet, language that secondary sources attribute to her consistently, though I couldn't pin one exact citation for the words in that order.
Kutluğ Ataman Istanbul / London / Barcelona
Lola + Bilidikid (1998) is set in Kreuzberg, inside a Turkish gay and drag subculture in Berlin, its characters facing discrimination as both gay and Turkish. It is the one film in this guide that photographs the same city as everything else here. Turner Prize nomination, 2004, the same year as Twelve. Based between Istanbul, London and Barcelona.

Where mine sits

I don’t know most of these people personally. I built this map by watching the field, the same as I built the photography guide beside it. I think I’m the only one here who works in photography, and the only one whose central subject is queer refugees and asylum seekers specifically.

The full Come Get Your Honey series is online. The photography guide covers queer photographers from and based in Germany. All eleven field guides map the wider field.

Sources

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

← Field guides