Artist and writer Meriç Algün explores the world around her and her own inner world through her writing, and shows her discoveries in a new solo exhibition, The Patient Cries, at Lunds konsthall. The exhibition centres around one of Algün’s literary works, which addresses the role of the stepmother, mental health, and caring for others. Visitors will take on different roles in the exhibition’s installation, which consists of a full-scale replica of the artist’s own home. In this time, when political and social discourse is increasingly focusing on the issues of women’s reproductive rights and fertility, Meriç Algün’s deeply personal works are particularly relevant and incisive. Alongside the exhibition, a series of talks and readings will be organised in collaboration with Lund’s Public Library.
There are artists for whom writing is an essential part of their practice. Meriç Algün is one of those artists: an artist/writer. For her, writing is a way to explore, catalogue, question, and understand both the world around her and her own inner world. Her new solo exhibition The Patient Cries is centred on the artist’s new literary work The Stepmother Violet which she describes as “a work of autofiction written in interrelated fragments.” Algün started writing this about three years ago, as a way of exploring and reflecting on the role of a stepmother based on her own experience. The work delves also into issues of mental health and the shifts that are underway in caretaking roles within and outside the family context in contemporary western society. The artist’s text is the backbone of the exhibition, and apart from being present in the catalogue, it is also manifested in a new installation that occupies the entirety of the exhibition space.
For the installation, the artist’s apartment, a main character in her text, has been carefully reproduced at full scale in its bare elements – walls and voids alike – inside Lunds konsthall. Visitors to the exhibition will play manifold roles as guests, intruders, witnesses, and explorers as they try to grasp and make sense of what they’re seeing inside the space. In parallel with her writing journey, the artist has spent several years working on the design of a wallpaper that encapsulates the essence of her emotional journey as described in her text and which will be part of the installation. The version on display in the exhibition is the result of a collaboration with the designer Johan Hjerpe. Both these processes, the writing of her literary work and the creation of the wallpaper, have been carefully documented. The films and photographs that document her journey, and some of the objects collected by the artist, are exhibited in the show.
Algün was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1983 and has been living and working in Stockholm, Sweden, for many years. Her work is based on thorough and meticulous research, and explorations of the various topics and issues that interest her: identity, love, bureaucracy, language, literature, gender, politics, motherhood, and so on. She’s fascinated with language and definitions. In her work, she often refers back to her own experiences as an immigrant with a fluid identity, living in the crossroads between two countries, two cultures, and two languages.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a programme of activities organised in collaboration with Lund’s Public Library, which will include public readings and talks with the artist and guest speakers, as well as other events. In the current political, ideological, and social context, where women’s reproductive rights and legislation related to fertility are topics that are high on the electoral agendas in many countries, the timely and deeply personal works in this exhibition add even more poignancy and universal relevance to Meriç Algün’s voice as an artist.
Press release from Lunds konsthall
Image: Meriç Algün. Installation view of The Patient Cries, Lunds konsthall, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist
