Inspired by Articulate Muscle: The Male Body in Art at the Whitney Museum in 1976, COMEBACK is the fifth iteration in an ongoing series exploring the reshaping and optimization of the body, as well as the fascination and artificiality of this self-determined act. COMEBACK is a hyper-assemblage. As a live exhibition, four performers—dancers and bodybuilders—pose as kinetic sculptures and perform choreographed actions in response to Kunak’s spoken instructions. Bringing together pole dancing, bodybuilding, climbing sculptures, and a series of live sculptures, COMEBACK unfolds as an archive of postures in which bodies, objects, and movements are continuously assembled and reconfigured.

The work takes its point of departure from the 1976 performance festival and symposium initiated by Marcia Tucker, where prominent bodybuilders—including Arnold Schwarzenegger—presented their trained bodies on rotating turntables while art historians gave a lecture on the male body. In COMEBACK, moving stage elements such as a scissor lift, dance pole, and rotating platform extend this logic of display, transforming the space into a shifting exhibition architecture in which bodies, objects, and machinery continuously rearrange their relationships. The resulting all-over display recalls the simultaneity and event-like structure of a Fluxus happening.

Performers: Bilgesu Akyürek & Dustin Harder. Other performers are still to be announced.

Bio

Göksu Kunak bio Göksu Kunak (b. 1985, Ankara) is an artist, researcher, and writer based in Berlin. In 2025 Kunak was awarded the Akademie der Künste Kunstpreis (Berlin Prize for Art) in Performing Arts. Drawing on influences such as Arabesk culture, late modernity, and orientalist discourse, Göksu Kunak critically examines processes of self-Orientalization as well as strategies of camouflage, self-censorship, and speculative fiction through performance and installation. In the artist’s works, the powerful and hyperreal movements and sounds of bodybuilders, pole dancers, and climbers, among other motifs, are testaments to Kunak’s engagement with chronopolitics and hybrid textual forms to explore the performative languages of contemporary life. Most recently Kunak has focused on score-based performances and installations that investigate the body as both simulacrum and sculptural object, with particular attention to musculature, fortitude, and embodiment. Their work has been presented internationally at institutions and platforms. Kunak have exhibited and performed at EBENSPERGER, Neue Nationalgalerie, Performa NYC, Kaaitheater Brussels, Van Abbe Museum a.o. Kunak will premiere Le Sacre du Printemps at Gorki Theater in Berlin in January 2027.

‍In collaboration with CC Strombeek

CC Strombeek encourages experimentation in the contemporary visual arts, with a focus on an emerging generation of artists. The art center’s activities are embedded within the broader infrastructure and multidisciplinary programme of the Cultural Center of Strombeek, located on the border with the North of Brussels.  

Through a leading programme of (inter)national artists whose practices engage with urgent and relevant questions, we seek to broaden visitors’ perspectives and encourage new ways of seeing and thinking. We provide a space in which there is time to slow down, experiment, take risks, make mistakes and learn from them.

With a long-standing history of exhibitions that place artists and their practices at the heart of its activities, the organisation occupies a distinctive position within the artistic landscape of the Brussels periphery.