Artist
Duygu Gün
Duygu Gün is a storyteller, musician, and arts professional originating from Anatolia, the Asian part of modern Turkey. Her family moved from Crete to Turkey during the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in the early 1900s, and Duygu grew up appreciating, belonging to, and longing for two different cultures — Turkish and Greek. With a desire to explore cultures and traditions around the world, she left home to travel; while she preserved and represented her own culture in different lands, she also learned the language, music, dance, and traditions of each culture she encountered. Her works incorporate explorations and interpretations of the cultures that have hosted her, exploring commonalities and questioning underlying meanings within traditions using music, video, light, and shadow. Duygu performs around the Bay Area covering traditional Turkish, Sephardic, and Balkan music, and is a co-curator of Sounds Like Home.
About the Work
In the Shade by Duygu Gün examines lullabies through a critical lens, revealing them as cautionary tales that encode societal roles, rules, and expectations. Gün, one of the exhibition's curators, draws from her own Turkish heritage to analyze how lullabies — often perceived as innocent and soothing — carry subliminal messages about gender norms, obedience, and social hierarchy. The work invites viewers to listen more carefully to the words beneath the melody and to consider how these seemingly harmless songs shape our understanding of our place in the world from the earliest moments of consciousness.