Meriç Algün: The Patient Cries

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 hanging on the walls of the installation. Both these processes, the writing of her literary work and the creation of the wallpaper, have been carefully documented by the artist and form part of the exhibition at the gallery.

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.