Şükran Moral

Bordello, 1997, Video, 8’24”

In 1997, I staged a performance in the brothel known as “Yüksek Kaldırım” in Istanbul, a historically significant place with a history of at least a century that had also entered the country’s cinema and popular songs. Of course, no artist had performed in a brothel either before or after me. This performance, which went far beyond simply taking photographs at the entrance, was created for the 5th Istanbul Biennial. My intention was to perform in a brothel, a psychiatric hospital, a morgue, and a hammam, and then present these performances on a gynaecological examination table bearing the words “View Istanbul from My Vagina.” And that is precisely what I did. Entering the brothel in Istanbul also meant breaking a major taboo. I call this “slashing open the belly of taboos.” In this performance, which I carried out together with the brothel workers, I held a sign reading “For Sale,” while placing the words “Museum of Contemporary Art” above the brothel entrance. It was an exchange of positions between the museum and the brothel. The work also addressed the artist’s own condition of being for sale and sought, through dark humour, to expose the exploitation embedded within the art world. I would describe the work as an exposure of a patriarchal system that expects women in works of art to remain virginal, while treating and using women as objects in brothels. It was also an intervention by the artist into deeply rooted social taboos.