13–16 November 2014
Paris Photo
Booth C42
Grand Palais
Paris
Galeri Zilberman’s solo presentation of Şükran Moral’s works at Paris Photo aim to look at the artist’s practice within the history of performance through the specific perspective of photography’s role in historicizing and monumentalizing performance. Moral’s works carry a specific urgency today; it is important to reflect on the time they were produced to understand the artist as a true social commentator and a pioneer performance as well as an example of the spirit of artistic and political dissent in Turkey today.
Şükran Moral, is a seminal figure in contemporary art in Turkey. She challenges taboos, traditions, structures of hierarchy, as well as art historical frameworks. Her process involves getting acquainted with the “other” by immersing herself in their reality and physical space. Moral weaves together the media of performance, video, and photography, as the performances and situations that she sets up reads completely differently on these media—the photographs serving as testaments that transform the experiential into the historical.
Şükran Moral’s Married with Three (1994), in which she “marries” three people in her Rome studio, is an ironic comment on the legal procedures awaiting her as an immigrant in Italy. Remarkable is how Moral inscribes her artistic actions in public space—dominated by formal and informal, acknowledged or imposed social rules—in order to provoke a kind of short circuit in perceptual mechanisms. Be it in a brothel (Bordello, 1997), a Turkish bath for men (Hamam, 1997), a village square (Marriage with Three Men, 2010), an insane asylum (Mental Hospital, 1997) or in a morgue (Gasilhane, 1997), the attitude that the artist assumes in these spaces departs from the approach of experiencing of the world from the inside. When Moral operates “inside” these spaces, which entail standardized constraints and clear codes of conduct, she provokes tension as well as reactions from the audience in this environment that are then documented in videos. Included in the spaces that Moral occupies are gay clubs, an important yet disregarded part of the subculture in Istanbul. Her presence in these clubs as a heterosexual woman, as an artist, is an act of solidarity. Trans: Istanbul is not only a documentation of her presence there but also of a relationship formed between her and the regulars of this club.
Galeri Zilberman promotes artists from Turkey internationally and introduces international artists to the local art scene in Istanbul. The solo presentation of Şükran Moral’s work at Paris Photo aims to contextualize Moral’s practice within the larger tradition of feminist, politically charged work to emerge from Europe while anchoring her performance-based practice in the documentary nature of the medium of photography.
