Viron Erol Vert

Family Matters

Alle Grenzen liegen in uns selbst

Family and cultural conditioning play a crucial role in the work of the German Turkish artist Viron Erol Vert (born 1975; lives and works in Berlin and Istanbul). His expansive installations and sculptures explore religious systems, cultural identities, and linguistic experiences. Vert playfully reinterprets politically charged matters such as the “headscarf debate”; he engages with this topic by printing fashionable women's hairstyles onto such scarves. Another installation commemorates the 2013 Gezi Park protests. Vert made bronze casts of the protestors’ gas masks, which were in fact repurposed water bottles widely used after instructions on how to make them had circulated on social media. Everyday objects and textiles are recurring media in Vert’s works—he examines sexuality, gender, and heritage by combining sex swings with traditional Anatolian woven carpets, or by printing the word “Kimlik” (identity) on other carpets.

The publication Family Matters is the first to document a cross-section of Vert’s work. It communicates his unfaltering perspective of cultural hegemony that results from identity politics. The texts were written by Nadja Abt, Ingo Arend, Stéphane Bauer, Zuri Maria Daiß, Tülin Duman, Yusuf Etiman, Katerina Gregos, Marius Kwint, Isabel Lewis, Bedral Madra, Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis, Bige Örer, Mohammad Salemy, Eva Scharrer, Wendy M. K. Shaw, Angelika Stepken, Jonas Tinius, Didem Yazıcı, Misal Adnan Yıldız, and Kourosh Zarghani. Two interviews with the artist were conducted by Misal Adnan Yıldız and Hans Peter Hahn.