curated by Simonetta Lux
11 > 12.2005
Some key themes of Sükran Moral’s investigations are religion, gender disparities and death. Through the dressing up, the artist experiences the ambiguity and violence of exclusion in her own skin, fully immersed in the most unlikely and provocative situations. A short circuit of allusions and references, the artist tries to provoke a public reaction of criticism, so as to convert the passive enjoyment of artistic reflection into a consciously active one. ‘Dressing up’ the power wrought by pervasive social control, Sükran Moral intensely reaffirms the strength of her female identity, together with all the freedom of her artistic choice.
In Leyla and Mecnun Sukran Moral takes a cue from an Arab fable originally set in the desert. Here Sükran, as always in her work, has shifted the historical timeframe to maintain a modern relevance, and has recreated the story in a Palermo hammam (Turkish bath). The hamam is used in Sükran’s work for its place in the collective imagination, not only in its country of origin, Turkey, but throughout the world, the mere thought of which arouses a sense of untouchability and impenetrability. Already once, very dangerously, Sükran has breached the secrect and forbidden male Turkish bath, namely the hammam in Istanbul, where she was washed, touched and smelled by an employee: seduction for all, a scandal on the inside. Once again today she tells what seems at first an innocent story, but which then explodes: a tableau vivant for death. A fairy tale, a love story in modern times ending in a Turkish bath where Leyla and Mecnun die snorting cocaine. Sukran draws us into a grand seduction, purification, all romantic – exalted – a contradiction without mercy.
Two lovers, an Arab Muslim girl and Christian boy, die not of love but from overdose, whatever the religion. The contradiction, the truth and their deaths are not presented with a fictious soap-opera realism, but rather through a sophisticated, cynical, elegant and cultured choice of images. Directed and photographed by the artist herself and only seemingly sans le savoir, Sukran recalls the great masters of romantic painting. She is Ingres and Delacroix. This video photographer leaves us naked, strips us.
Translation by Fergus Liam Boden Cloughley
