caner teker was born 1994 in Duisburg, Germany and lives and works in Düsseldorf and Berlin. In 2019, teker graduated as a master student from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and went on to complete a two-year postgraduate programme at SNDO – School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam. caner teker has performed at numerous venues, including tanzhaus nrw and Hau – Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, DE (2021), as part of Berlin Atonal x Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin, DE (2021), and at Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna, AT (2022), Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin, DE (2022), and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, DE (2022). Among other awards, teker has received the Förderpreis für Nachwuchskünstler*innen in Bildender Kunst by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia (2017) and the Förderpreis der Stadt Düsseldorf (2020). Grants and residencies include awards from the Ministry of Art and Science, NRW (2020), PACT Zollverein, Essen, DE (2022), and, in 2023, from the Kunststiftung NRW and Kunsthalle Bergen in Norway.
caner teker uses the means of performance to address the intersectional entanglement of identity, labor, and postmigration in the context of personal experience and family history. Among other things, the performances deal with West Asian cultural history and traditional oil wrestling, in which fighting poses mutate into a gesture of tenderness between the performers – a phenomenon that can also be observed in the templates of traditional male oil wrestling matches. Bodies "beyond the mainstream" that correspond to teker's "ideal image of the queer, anti-capitalist, intersectional as well as transformative" are the focus of the performances.
