Welcome to Turkey

24/09/2014 - 06/11/2014


Şükran Moral, one of the leading performance artists in Turkey, arranges the gallery space as a tourism bureau in her solo exhibition “Welcome to Turkey”. At the entrance we are greeted by “Tales to a Young Girl”, a video installation that forces us to kneel. The visitor can only view the work by kneeling down and looking through a narrow gap. A modern-day person that has been forced to kneel as atonement for yet another violent and cruel act against a young girl...

After this act of kneeling, instead of the sun, the sea and tulips, a girl wearing a bloody wedding dress awaits us as if saying “Welcome to Hell”, with a bloody mattress shaped like a map of Turkey in front of her.

The works “Child-Bride” and “Tales to a Young Girl” that have been shown this year at Edith Russ Haus in Oldenburg will be exhibited for the first time in Turkey at Galeri Zilberman. Focusing on women’s issues, polygamous marriage, marginalized transgender individuals, virginity, female circumcision and repressed desires of women from the starting point of her artistic career, Şükran Moral says “welcome” by facing us with a reality we do not want to see.

Şükran Moral is known for her works that question tradition, taboos, hierarchical structures and historical frameworks. The artist positions herself as “the other”, both in terms of physical space and reality. As Ali Şimşek writes about her exhibition: “At the center of all of Şükran Moral’s production lies such confrontation. Desire, the body, veil, cuts that encode

the body... Moral shows that all bodies, especially her own, are wrapped up by a political cocoon. To free the body... this is the biggest political utopia. From Female Jesus to the Vagina that bleeds and spreads with the scarlet color of menstruation and virginity, Moral’s whole biography (or bio-politics) confronts this hidden “disgrace” and desire.

Photo by Franz Wamhof.


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