İris Ergül
İris Ergül is a practicing artist currently based in Istanbul, Turkey. Iris has a background with philosophical studies and years of hands-on experience in the clothing industry. All of these facets contribute to her artwork today. She received her BFA in Sculpture summa cum laude from the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (MSFAU) in Istanbul and graduated with an MFA degree in Studio Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is pursuing phD study in Fine Arts and is currently teaching courses on Contemporary Art Practice at the MSFAU. She has received the Sabancı Art Prize, Fulbright Scholarship and SFAI Fellowship.
She has shown her work in the Cappadox Contemporary Art in Nevşehir; Abud Efendi Mansion as part of Colony exhibition, 13th Istanbul Biennial as part of a collaborative work, Nesrin Esirtgen Collection and Mixer Arts in Istanbul; Müze Evliyagil in Ankara; Diego Rivera Gallery and Swell Gallery in San Francisco, Bak in Utrecht and Schwules Museum in Berlin.
She works with a diverse array of mediums ranging from conventional materials like ink and paper to tactile ones like textile and latex that integrate semantic proximity to our corporeal nature of affections. The limitations inherent in the materials that inform the process and the gestural juxtaposition of materials aim to be evident in the final work and draw into phantasmagoric realms. She also has an ongoing performative lecture series which stand somewhere amongst an academic lecture, storytelling or a shamanistic ritual.
Her research technique which tackles the ways the ecstatic truth is fabricated, gives room for the academic knowledge to intermingle with speculative and fictive elements.
Her visual inspiration comes from her collection of vintage books which contains illustrations of anatomy, close-up details revealing cross-sections, images of unfamiliar fauna and flora, illustrations of diseases and the microscopic images. To sum up, the knowledge production methods of natural history that shaped the modern age and our ways of meaning-making, conjure up her curiosity. She also integrates these bizarre and captivating images derived from encyclopedia, medicine and anatomy books into her work by way of reconstructing their temporality and authenticity. Her body of works investigates the very condition of all beings everywhere and the interconnectedness with their surroundings. Her work is an investigation through our ways of encountering the world and our bodily existence. Her art questions what it means to be a presence in the universe beyond our singular identities and how we can interact together to ceaselessly become multiplicities notwithstanding the organizational structures while embodying co-shaping in all sorts of relationality of all sorts of individualities.
