Şükran Moral, 1962

Born in Samsun in 1962, 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. Through her performances, she places such entrenched social concepts as power, violence, otherness, and familiarity into representative forms. Moral uses her own body and identity in her works, and by using the theatrical possibilities of the performance tradition, she frequently transforms into other characters.

Şükran Moral’s “BORDELLO” was performed in a brothel on Yüksekkaldırım in İstanbul in 1997. Moral hung a sign reading “Modern Art Museum” on the door of the brothel and held a paper reading “for sale.” Her seductive black transparent dress, which left her breasts exposed, was a reference to the exhibitionistic systems imposed on women’s bodies. This work expresses the dual connotations arising from Moral being both an artist and a woman: by being bought, her works investigate the concept of ownership and the notion that the female body can be put on display at a brothel. Using both the visual arts and the female body as materials for a theatrical production, Moral contemplates the inability of the visual arts to free themselves from the consumerist culture.