Artist
İris Ergül
İris Ergül is a practicing artist currently based in Istanbul, Turkey. With a background in philosophical studies and years of hands-on experience in the clothing industry, she received her BFA in Sculpture summa cum laude from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University (MSFAU) in Istanbul and an MFA in Studio Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is pursuing PhD study in Fine Arts and currently teaches courses on Contemporary Art Practice at MSFAU. She has received the Sabancı Art Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship, and an SFAI Fellowship, and has shown her work at Cappadox Contemporary Art, the 13th Istanbul Biennial, Mixer Arts in Istanbul, the Diego Rivera and Swell Galleries in San Francisco, and the Schwules Museum in Berlin. She works with a diverse array of mediums, from ink and paper to textile and latex, and maintains an ongoing performative lecture series that stands somewhere between academic lecture, storytelling, and shamanistic ritual.
Visit websiteAbout the Work
Old She-Hyena by İris Ergül is a ritualistic performance piece centered around a wearable sculpture that represents the body of the artist's grandmother. Drawing from Turkish folk traditions and the archetypal figure of the 'old she-hyena' — a character from Anatolian lullabies used to frighten children into sleep — Ergül reclaims this figure as a symbol of feminine power and ancestral wisdom. The wearable sculpture transforms the performer's body into a vessel for intergenerational memory, blurring the boundaries between the living and the ancestral, the comforting and the fearsome. The work interrogates how lullabies encode complex messages about gender, obedience, and the supernatural.