Şükran Moral, 1962

Born in Samsun, Şükran Moral studied fine arts at Ankara University and later graduated from the Rome Academy of Fine Arts. Since 1994, she has transformed a large number of places, ranging from brothels and hamams to mental hospitals and museums into platforms for performances, videos, and installations. She has been representing deep rooted problems such as women’s rights, sexual identity, the segregation and isolation of people with mental health issues as well as oppressive systems since the 1990s through her performances. Moral deals with personal and social taboos, particularly those which aretacitly accepted without being talked about. She tackles such entrenched social concepts as power, violence, otherness, and familiarity

“Bakırköy Mental Institution” is a semi-documentary video that Şükran Moral produced in the women’s ward of the Bakırköy Mental Institution in Istanbul in 1997, when she recorded her experience at the institution for a day without resorting to a script. She endeavors to show the viewer how the culture of violence operates and what it is like to live in an environment in which one is made to look like everyone else, from their haircuts to their clothes, to be deliberately and methodically shorn of one’s individual identity.