Onur Hamilton Karaoğlu presents In Vain at Hara on 29 June, following its premiere at the Vienna Festival, produced in collaboration with Berlin-based art collective Slavs and Tatars as part of their conceptual space, Pickle Bar.

Taking its name from the song by Aşık Mahzuni Şerif, In Vain is a performance that invites the audience to collectively create a poetic anthology in the footsteps of the Anatolian aşık (minstrel) tradition. During the performance, the audience is divided into four groups, each encountering a storyteller from a different historical moment. These parallel narratives ultimately converge around a recent ecological omen: the 2021 outbreak of sea snot (marine mucilage) in the Sea of Marmara.

Bringing together four characters from Istanbul, including a long-lost sea, a medieval oceanographer, a 20th-century poet, and a contemporary young writer, In Vain creates a space for exploring the flow of time and the possibilities of meaning-making in the face of crisis.