in frame of Transgressive Memory Festival
AŞ is a dinner ceremony and performance set within an immersive gaming environment. In Tatar tradition, AŞ is an intimate ancestral ritual in which life and death, beginnings and endings, are honored through togetherness. About 20 guests (please register below) are invited to gather around one table and experience a form of intimacy that is usually kept behind closed doors.
The physical dinner ceremony unfolds within an immersive spatial installation based on the computer game AŞ, with the game world projected across the surrounding walls and accompanied by a music album of the same title. Released in 2025 by the Berlin-based music project TATAR KYZ:LAR (Allapopp and Dinara Rasuleva), it aims to reinvent Tatar identities and reclaim culture and language — as an act of soft resistance against russification — while intertwining them with immigrant and queer experiences.
AŞ invites participants to dive into the estranged depths of Tatar souls, exploring childhood memories and reflections on fragmented cultural identities. The narration of AŞ is inspired by the poetry series Lostlingual by Dinara Rasuleva. Musical production by allapopp features the Virtual Tatar Choir — an AI instrument trained on manually collected recordings of rural Tatar voices and choirs.
The AŞ dinner performance lasts approximately three hours, during which a four-course meal, including dessert and non-alcoholic beverages, is served in a sacred order intertwined with poetry, songs, and moments of blessing.
Traditionally meat-based, this version of AŞ is reimagined as vegan to reflect the artists’ values and create a space inclusive to all. Fragments of ritual and whispers of the unseen will continue warming hearts long after the table is cleared.
Registration, more information:
transgressivememoryfestival.com/programme/tatar-kyzlar
Credits:
Songs: TATAR KYZ:LAR, feat. Aigel Gaisina (06) & Sveta Ben (10), Ay Bılbılım — Tatar Folk song excerpt (0)
Story & Gameplay: TATAR KYZ:LAR
Graphic design: Teresa Schönherr
Creative technology & 3D design: Warja Rybakova (DOCKdigital)
The Game AŞ is funded by Musikfonds e.V. and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.
Supported by DOCKdigital, co-producing “Dinner-Ceremony AŞ” by allapopp & Warja Rybakova, contributing to the festival’s curation and production, and providing technical and production equipment.
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With contributions by CTM Festival, transmediale and VideoClub.
The festival is free and open to all, with free registration required only for workshops and some performances.
With art works, performances and talks by Bashir Bashir, caner teker, Gabriel Massan, Göksu Kunak, Forensic Architecture, allapopp (Tatar:Kyzlar), Dan Hicks, Giselle Beiguelman, Hussein Shikha, Royce Ng and many more.
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Transgressive Memory Festival
How and through which lenses do we remember in the age of algorithms, artificial intelligence, and digital media? Who decides which stories are preserved, forgotten, or rewritten?
And what happens when media, performance, and sound artists, rather than institutions, negotiate cultural heritage and histories to critically investigate our present and form alternative visions for our future?
Transgressive Memory is a new festival, which explores how contemporary art and critical thinking are transforming the ways we as societies relate ourselves to our multifaceted pasts.
Taking place on 12–13 September 2026 at silent green Kulturquartier in Berlin, Transgressive Memory Festival invites audiences to take part in art and critical research, exploring how the past is haunting our present.
Bringing together international artists, researchers, performers and cultural practitioners, Transgressive Memory Festival examines memory not as something fixed or complete, but as a living process, which we constantly negotiate. We give space to artistic works that move beyond biased categories separating documentary and fiction, the archive and the practice of speculation, physical and digital worlds. To us, to be transgressive means: to refuse inherited limits, to aim for a disruption of official histories, to cross disciplinary boundaries, and to reshape memory culture by listening to often unheard voices as well as using new technologies to investigate invisiblities and power relations.
Our curated programme challenges established forms of commemoration and memorialisation by focussing on artistic and critical contributions to memory culture and its socio-political environment. The works presented propose new ways of building relationships between histories, technologies and urgent questions of our contemporary, mediated global society shaped by new ways of seeing and hearing.
Transgressive Memory Festival is organised by eCommemoration, the programme for artistic and trangressive forms of (digital) memory-making initiated by Körber-Stiftung. With contributions by transmediale, CTM and VideoClub.
All festival info can be found on transgressivememoryfestival.com.