Samet DurgunPhotographer
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Queer Refugee Artists in Germany

Journal · Field guide

The artists working, right now, across drag, theatre, literature, film and music at the intersection of queerness and asylum in Germany — a wider field than photography, and one I'm inside only as a photographer and a friend.

This is the wider field around Come Get Your Honey, once photography is taken 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, it isn’t here.

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 Germany — Nuremberg / Erlangen-Nürnberg Elfiye Fiction
Madi Awadalla Berlin / Glasgow 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 the two collectives come 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 — founded by Olympia Bukkakis in 2015 and staged at SO36 and other Berlin venues since. Bukkakis is not herself a refugee: 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. One source calls Prince Emrah its founder, a peer-reviewed study calls him one of the founders — both stand, unresolved. Oyoun hosted its third-anniversary Soli party in 2021.
Prince Emrah Berlin
Belly dance, drag, DJing and cabaret curation, and the pivot of this cluster — he builds stages rather than only working them. Sought asylum in Germany alone, arriving from Turkmenistan around 2015 or 2016, sources differ on the year. Pronouns she/he, in his own words. Founded, or co-founded — accounts disagree — QueerBerg in 2018; hosts Black & Brown Cabaret; runs the Whoriental Festival. He 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. Fled Syria, arrived in Berlin on a student visa around 2016, and later applied for asylum — an asylum seeker, not a documented refugee. 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 tells the route on her own site: Kassel, then Gießen to lodge the claim, paid for by her first fee, eight months in Thuringia, Berlin from 2019. She performed for years with QueerBerg-Collective, and names Queens Against Borders as the network that held her when she came out in 2023. She is in Come Get Your Honey, and we spoke at the Fotografiska opening.

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 rather than 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, 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 Germany — Nuremberg / Erlangen-Nürnberg
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 — its 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 / Glasgow
Writer, filmmaker and psychosocial worker, formerly published as Ahmed Awadalla; now goes by Madi, they/them, per their own site. From Egypt, based between Berlin and Glasgow. 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 rather than 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 — 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 rather than 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 — 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 as 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, based 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 is closer to where I stand than to where the first section stands.

Faraz Shariat Berlin / Cologne
Not a refugee — born in Cologne, to parents who fled Iran after the 1979 revolution, by his own account. 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 detention centre is the film's premise, not his biography. His second feature, Prosecution, took the Panorama Audience Award at Berlinale 2026. The distinction is the point of including him here.
Aykan Safoğlu and Emre Busse Berlin
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), made with nearly fifty people met over several years, around fifteen portraits carrying the final series, sitting among photographs of the city. First-generation immigrant, in Berlin since 2013, later a German citizen, 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 rather than a member, which is why the work stands beside this field rather than simply inside it.

The collectives in the first section hold, correctly, that refugee performers should represent themselves — Prince Emrah built a stage rather than wait 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 just tried to work inside it honestly.

The series is here. The photography twin to this guide is here. The hub for the wider field is here.

Sources

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

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