Samet Durgun Photographer
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Artists Around Queer Refugee Life in Germany

Journal · Field guide · Updated October 2026

The artists working across drag, theatre, literature, film and music where queerness and asylum meet in Germany, a field wider than photography.

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 field around my Come Get Your Honey, once I take photography out of it. The twin to this guide covers photographers specifically; here is drag and cabaret, theatre and literature, film and music, wherever queerness and asylum meet in Germany. I built it from public records, artists’ own sites and the institutions that documented them, not from personal knowledge. I don’t know most of the people below. I’m a photographer watching a field, not a member reporting from inside it. Two exceptions come up as they arrive. Where a claim about someone’s identity or status couldn’t be pinned to their own words or an institution’s, I’ve left it out.

At a glance

Artist Based Key work Discipline
Queens Against Borders Berlin The party itself, since 2015 Drag and performance; a solidarity party
QueerBerg Collective Berlin Shows and Soli parties, from 2018 Drag, cabaret and performance collective
Prince Emrah Berlin Black & Brown Cabaret; Whoriental Festival Belly dance, drag, DJ, cabaret curation
The Darvish Berlin Co-organises Queens Against Borders; Together Belly dance, performance, organising
Kylie Divon Berlin Drag with QueerBerg-Collective Drag, music, “artivism”
Sasha Marianna Salzmann Berlin Außer sich (2017) Dramaturgy, prose
Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu Nuremberg / Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany Elfiye Fiction
Madi Awadalla Berlin Queer Exile; Another German Essayistic prose, film, counselling
Mahmoud Hassino Berlin Mr Gay Syria (2017) Organising, magazine publishing; film subject
The Quarteera cohort Berlin-administered I Have to Run; I Dance; and others Film, performance, literature
Nikita Volkov Munich Performances with Munich Kyiv Queer Opera, pop, rock
Faraz Shariat Berlin / Cologne Futur Drei (2020); Prosecution (2026) Film
Aykan Safoğlu and Emre Busse Berlin ğ – soft g – queer forms migrate (2017) Essay film, research, curating
Samet Durgun Berlin Come Get Your Honey Photography, artist book

The stage is the practice

In drag and cabaret the organising is the work, so I’ve put the two collectives before the people who built them.

Queens Against Borders Berlin
A performance party built, in its founder's words, as solidarity with trans and queer refugees. It was founded by Olympia Bukkakis in 2015 and has been staged at SO36 and other Berlin venues since. Bukkakis is not herself a refugee. She is Australian, in Berlin since 2012. The Darvish has co-organised since 2018. Each night opens with a panel discussion, and past editions have raised money for gender-affirming surgery and run self-defence workshops, with resident performers from Syria and Iraq.
QueerBerg Collective Berlin
A BiPOC collective, in its own words, "for queer Refugee and other trans* artists and performers in Berlin," with members from Syria, Palestine, Malaysia, Kurdistan and Turkey who depend on the German asylum system. It started by the end of 2018. Prince Emrah is among its founders. Oyoun hosted its third-anniversary Soli party in 2021.
Prince Emrah Berlin
Belly dance, drag, DJing and cabaret curation, and the centre of this cluster, since she builds stages as well as working them. Sought asylum in Germany alone, arriving from Turkmenistan in the mid-2010s, per Tunay Altay's study, where her own words are "when you are a refugee, you are stateless." Pronouns she/he, as her Pop-Kultur artist page lists them. Among the founders of QueerBerg in 2018; hosts Black & Brown Cabaret; runs the Whoriental Festival. She interviewed me for Come Get Your Honey, turning the book's usual direction around.
The Darvish Berlin
Self-taught belly dancer, queer by The Darvish's own repeated description across interviews, which also gives the route out. The Darvish left Syria for a university place in Germany ("likely my only chance to leave Syria"), arriving in September 2016 on what Hyphen reports as a student visa, and later applied for asylum. Co-organises Queens Against Borders with Olympia Bukkakis since 2018. Co-hosted Yalla Hafla with the Israeli drag queen Judy LaDivina from 2017, relaunched in 2024 as Together. Co-authored the 2020 anthology ZUGZWÄNGE on queer migrants. The night after the 2026 attack near Berlin Pride, The Darvish performed with the collective on Museum Island anyway.
Kylie Divon Berlin
A trans woman (by her own account, the first Libyan trans woman to come out publicly) who sought asylum in Germany and moved to Berlin once it was accepted. From her first months in the city she performed with QueerBerg-Collective, Prince Emrah's group. She is in Come Get Your Honey, and we spoke at the Fotografiska opening; the transcript of that talk is her account in her own words.

Writing from inside the system

Literature holds the one case here where the protection status is a matter of record and the work barely mentions it, and the one where displacement is the subject of the fiction and not a documented biography.

Sasha Marianna Salzmann Berlin
Born in Volgograd in 1985, raised in Moscow, arrived in Germany in 1995 as a Jewish quota refugee, a distinct legal route that is not asylum. Widely described in the German press as non-binary; I could not confirm that in Salzmann's own words. Former resident author and artistic director at Studio Я, Maxim Gorki Theater. Außer sich (2017) took the Jürgen Ponto-Stiftung prize and a Buchpreis shortlisting; Im Menschen muss alles herrlich sein (2021) won the Hermann-Hesse-Preis; the Kleist-Preis followed in 2024. None of it is framed around the quota-refugee status.
Nazlı Karabıyıkoğlu Nuremberg / Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
A PEN Centre Germany Writers-in-Exile fellow since February 2021, placed alongside a parallel Human Rights scholarship at Erlangen-Nürnberg. PEN describes her, in its own words, as a queer woman who lived in constant fear of arrest. That is PEN's framing, not a claim I can independently confirm. Her novel Elfiye, about queer life in Turkey, remains unpublished as a book; it is known through a 2020 English excerpt and a German translation PEN helped fund in 2022. Exile is the status the record supports, not refugee or asylum seeker.
Madi Awadalla Berlin
Writer, filmmaker and psychosocial worker, formerly published under another name; now goes by Madi, they/them, per their own site. From Egypt, living in Berlin. Queer Exile (2024) and the short story Another German draw on refugee accommodation and exile as subjects. I found that experience only inside the fiction and the film, not in a nonfiction account in their own voice, so I'm naming it as their material and not their documented biography. They work as a counsellor at Berliner Aids-Hilfe.

Film, music and the newer exile

A pageant that became a film, and a funded cohort that arrived after 2022. This is the part of the field that is changing fastest and is thinnest on the record.

Mahmoud Hassino Berlin
Founded Mawaleh, Syria's first queer magazine, and organised the Mr Gay Syria pageant in Istanbul, the subject of Ayşe Toprak's 2017 documentary. Gay, by his own public work and not by a reporter's label; he has also warned against the flattening shorthand "gay refugee." Arrived in Berlin in 2014 as a refugee, and now works at Schwulenberatung Berlin's LGBTI refugee centre, which opened in 2016 with room for 120 people. It is the infrastructure this whole guide keeps running into from outside.
The Quarteera cohort Berlin-administered
Sixteen projects funded in 2024 by the German Federal Foreign Office through Quarteera e.V., under the title Queer Culture in the Eastern Partnership Countries and in Exile. Exile is the programme's own framing, not a claim about any one artist's legal status. Oleg Khristolyubsky's film I Have to Run follows a queer director fleeing to Berlin. Igor Shugaleev, with Nowy Teatr in Warsaw, made the drag stand-up Will You Marry Me? Vika Biran, in Berlin, wrote the novel I Dance. Maria Sapizhak, also Berlin-based, made the documentary performance One-Two-Queer-Break.
Nikita Volkov Munich
An opera-trained singer from Odesa, formerly with the Odesa Philharmonic, who moved to Munich in spring 2022 as the war began. Munich Kyiv Queer, whose programming he performs through, describes him in its own words as openly gay and as having come to Munich as a refugee, language I could not independently confirm from Volkov himself or a second source. He appeared in the organisation's Collective Futures programme on Ukrainian queerness in 2022.

Made about the field, not from inside it

Two practices that took queer migration as their subject without claiming the condition, which puts them closer to where I stand than to where the first section stands.

Faraz Shariat Berlin / Cologne
He is not a refugee. He was born in Cologne, to Iranian parents who had migrated to Germany. His film Futur Drei, made with the Jünglinge collective, won the Teddy Award for best queer feature at Berlinale 2020; its story of a German-born Iranian and a newly arrived Iranian refugee in a refugee shelter is the film's premise, not his biography. His second feature, Prosecution, took the Panorama Audience Award at Berlinale 2026. The distinction is why I've included him here.
Aykan Safoğlu and Emre Busse Berlin
They are migrants, not refugees. Safoğlu moved from Istanbul to Berlin in 2008, Busse in 2013, both by their own account. Together they curated ğ – soft g – queer forms migrate at Schwules Museum Berlin, 3 March to 29 May 2017, on LGBTIQ+ exchange between Turkey and Germany, a show Busse called long overdue, at a museum Safoğlu saw as centred on white queer narratives. Safoğlu's essay film ziyaret, visit (2019), made with Gülşen Aktaş, continues the same territory at Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof.

Where mine sits

Samet Durgun Berlin
Come Get Your Honey (Kehrer Verlag, 2021), which I made with nearly fifty people I met over several years, around fifteen of whom are portrayed in the series, among photographs of the city. I'm a first-generation immigrant, in Berlin since 2013, later a German citizen, and on the record: "I am not a refugee, and I am not an asylum seeker." Two people in this guide are in the book: Prince Emrah, a friend, interviewed me for it; Kylie, who I photographed and met through it. The rest I know only from watching the field.

I think I’m the only one here whose central subject is the community itself, seen from the position of a friend and not a member, which is why the work stands beside this field instead of simply inside it.

The collectives in the first section hold, correctly, that refugee performers should represent themselves. Prince Emrah built a stage instead of waiting to be given one, and QueerBerg exists because self-representation was the point of it. I made a book slowly, from outside the condition, over other people’s faces. I don’t think that tension resolves. I’ve tried to work inside it and say so.

The full Come Get Your Honey series is online. The photography twin to this guide covers photographers of queer refugee life 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