LEASH and KHIDI present a new series of events aiming to empower the local and regional queer community, nurture and nourish the talents and create a model environment that does not replicate the oppressive hierarchies of late stage capitalism and techno-feudalism.

Series aim to strengthen the queer representation in all walks of culture, from audio-visual arts to music by inviting and prioritizing local artists to work in any media on a given topic of the current event.

In the current global geo-political climate, the mere citizens fall victim to the capitalist and imperialist interests of global powers, whose actions directly cause human and climate catastrophes. In the crisis of this scale, the marginalized groups become most vulnerable to the state-inflicted discrimination and violence, whose politics are transferring the blame and responsibility for the crisis to the minorities, shifting the public opinion by changing the focus of the core and fundamental failures of the state and cultivating hate-crime against the groups they try to implicit the blame on.

Caucasus region has been a playground to empires trying to use this land for their military strategic interests for centuries, which has caused conflict, war, alienation of people from their ancestral land, has forced indigenous communities to flee their homes, and has led to current alarming statistics of poverty making basic right to education among others a privilege. Northern neighbor that has had the region occupied for more than a century, and continues to occupy it, whose goal is to make states dependent on it for their safety and economy, has ties and collaborators in local governments that create policies to strengthen the dependence on the occupier and to replicate the empire’s model of governance that has strict anti LGBTQIA+ laws.

States manage to shift public focus on depicting the queer community and culture as the national threat to the traditions and religion, and cultivate the rhetoric of placing the blame and responsibility for the current crisis on the LGBTQIA+ community, rather than the collaborationist policies of the state. Hate crime and discrimination against the minorities are encouraged by the state that make individuals feel helpless against crime, and demoralized in front of law completely ignoring the community’s inherent basic human rights and input, importance and impact in progressing the culture.

With this project we would like to offer the marginalized the safe harbor as well as stimulate the collective strength and empowerment in reclaiming the power that authoritarian-like state tries to take away from the people by imposing its violence and disdain.

Leash represents the power of reclaiming the symbol of oppression and transforming it into the symbol of liberation