Songül Boyraz
“The Schindler residency contributed greatly to my art projects and life experience.”
In recent years, the artistic work of Songül Boyraz has focused on her own hair in order to explore the experiences of women in public and everyday life (family, religion, hierarchical and social constraints etc.), whose lives are rejected, questioned, and forced to exist within the boundaries set by others in positions of authority. These experiences consist of examples that fundamentally harm human life through physical and psychological violence. The artist’s work, therefore, aims to reflect the destruction and consequences of both psychological and physical bullying from her own perspective.
“As a witness of my time, I use my own hair in these projects — hair that has fallen out over the past decade. The meanings I assign to my hair reflect a woman’s desire for self-expression and an attempt to show her increasingly restricted freedom. This is mirrored in the aesthetics of the images, which convey feelings of isolation, loneliness, or silence. How political can our hair be?” (Songül Boyraz) In almost all of the artistic projects by Songül Boyraz, emotional intensity is at the forefront. While she seeks to address the weight of political and religious oppression spreading from her homeland through the power of art, she also feels the sorrow of recognizing that this oppression exists in various parts of the world — even in societies considered civilized today.
EDUCATION
2002
Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Vienna, Austria
2000
Scultpure, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Vienna, Austria
1994
Sculpture, Mimar Sinan Fine Art University
Istanbul, Türkiye
1990
Economics, Istanbul University
Istanbul, Türkiye
JURY
Eric Alliez
Harald Falckenberg
Greg Lynn
Eva Schlegel
Peter Noever
FINAL PROJECT
