At the intersection of aesthetics and ethics: Togæther with Suzanne Lacy
- Merve Akar Akgün
- 4 Şub
- 17 dakikada okunur
Güncelleme tarihi: 4 Şub
Suzanne Lacy, a pioneer of feminist art and participatory performance, is at Sakıp Sabancı Museum with her first comprehensive exhibition in Turkey, Togæther. Made possible with the contributions of the Sabancı Foundation and on view until March 8, 2026, the exhibition brings together the artist's production spanning over half a century around the axes of aging, violence, and solidarity. We spoke with Lacy, who takes art out of museum walls and embeds it right into life as “social practice,” about that delicate line where ethics meets aesthetics, collective memory, and how a museum can transform into a space for social learning
Interview: Merve Akar Akgün
Suzanne Lacy, 2026. Photo: Devin Oktar Yalkın
“After completing The Crystal Quilt performance in 1987, I gathered with a group I was working with around a yellow sheet of paper spread out on a table. We filmed the moments in which they re-imagined their roles in the production; what emerged was a large, collective drawing accompanied by a video of the conversation.”
—Suzanne Lacy
Following a change in leadership, the Sakıp Sabancı Museum opened its doors last year with a resolute stance. The first comprehensive exhibition in Turkey of Suzanne Lacy—a touchstone of feminist art and social practice—combined with Ahu Antmen’s curatorial vision, which she masterfully translated into the Turkish context, rendered the museum walls transparent. It opened a space where art steps out of the white cube to seep into the streets, public squares, and the very experience of women, whereby the aesthetic constructs the political.
The uniqueness of Suzanne Lacy’s practice lies in her ability to walk that uncanny line between activism and art without ever compromising on aesthetic rigor. Her staging of difficult subjects such as violence, aging, and labor with a visual poetry far removed from stridency places her in a special position in art history. Behind the scenes of this interview lies a personal story of admiration stretching to the other end of the Pacific. It could be no coincidence that the cover shoot we organized in Los Angeles unfolded with such fluidity, thanks to the high-level professionalism of Suzanne Lacy and Devin Yalkın. Witnessing the humble, clear, and solution-oriented demeanor in one-on-one communication of the Suzanne Lacy mind—which has for years directed crowds of hundreds in massive squares like an orchestral conductor—was a lesson in itself for me.
To read and watch Suzanne Lacy is to remember the ethical responsibility of being “together,” of listening, and of making room for oneself in another’s story. I am proud to have added this powerful annotation to art history to the Unlimited archive
Suzanne Lacy, The Crystal Quilt, 1985-1987, Performance, © Suzanne Lacy
You move across several roles — artist, activist, writer, educator — often all at once. When you look at your trajectory today, where do you locate yourself on that spectrum? What remains the core tension, the fundamental concern that still compels you to produce work?
If we are talking about primary identity, I identify as an artist. I perform many other activities in my professional life —organizing, administrating, educating, learning, including making a living— but my passion is making art. As for core tension, I’d say that my drive to create is strong, even dominant, in the way I’ve lived my life, even when I was studying science. And fundamental concept? That revolves around the ethics of relationship and collective governance.
In the show at Sakıp Sabancı Museum, the strong curatorial vision was provided by Ahu Antmen, who selected the works that she believed would be relevant to the Turkish context. She wisely understood that the twin poles of violence and community organization would be impactful, especially for women in this country. As an artist, I am intrigued by how people communicate those experiences that represent what we don’t currently know or understand, those that impact social and political practices. Whether I am in Los Angeles or in Istanbul, my work is about creating an aesthetic container where people who are usually spoken for can speak with each other. As an artist my job is to take the “messiness” and hidden aspects of real life and give it a form that is strong enough to hold your attention so that you can't look away from hard truths.
My formal teaching and my work as a designer of educational situations and institutions is related but secondary for me. Taken broadly, I do think about pedagogy a lot, a forum for exchange and mutual learning. I see the long process of my work as a kind of classroom where I learn along with participants, collaborators and audiences. As for this exhibition, is not surprising that both Ahu and I are experienced teachers. I understood her concept of turning the museum itself into a space of learning, where the audience’s questions about violence and women’s community became integral to the exhibition.
Birlikte isn't just a title; it is the method. If you look at the works we’ve brought to the Sabancı Museum—like The Crystal Quilt (about aging) or By Your Own Hand (about violence)—their construction was a function of the relationships built to create them. That isn’t always visible in the completed work, which is one of the reasons I try to put the works in context by exhibiting the process of their formation.
Suzanne Lacy, 2026. Photo: Devin Oktar Yalkın
“In 2010, I realized Tattooed Skeleton, a multi-part performance on domestic violence in Spain, for the Museo Reina Sofía. For one of the events, the real personal experiences of 500 Spanish women were handwritten onto masks.”
—Suzanne Lacy
There’s a striking line quoted in the catalogue: “Aesthetic moments are what make me happy; otherwise, I would simply enter politics.” How has this tension between aesthetic pleasure and political engagement shaped your practice? Is there a point at which you feel an idea risk slipping out of art and into activism alone?
That is the essential question, isn’t it? It is the tightrope I have walked for fifty years. You ask if there is a point where an idea risks slipping out of art and into activism only. My answer to the question is yes, but I can’t tell you exactly where it is in any given piece. I have to say I like the challenge of ambiguity, in which new forms emerge. Over the years I’ve learned to trust my skills and intuition, but I often don’t know if a work succeeds as art until it is performed. The risk isn't that it becomes “too political.” The risk is that it loses its power to evoke emotion, insight, the sense that one has learned something new. If I were to organize a protest, the goal would be immediate, concrete change. But as an artist, my goals are different.
It’s a tension between pleasure and responsibility. This seems a fundamental dilemma in Western culture: where is the line between satisfying one’s own needs, desires, pleasures and taking care of the needs of the whole? I satisfy the political through gestures or actions that become part of the whole--for instance, media presentations, conferences, manifestos, and direct action. But the center of the work depends on an aesthetic production. The point to change a way of seeing.
When you look at a work like The Crystal Quilt—which involved hundreds of older women sitting at tables—it was absolutely a political statement about the invisibility of aging women. But if it had just been a conference or a manifesto, it would have been easily categorized and easily dismissed. Instead, we made it a spectacle. We used color, geometry, sound, and synchronized movement. We created a “living painting” with the collaboration of painters (including Miriam Schapiro), theater and sound artists. The aesthetic beauty was strategic: it seduces you into looking at something—like the experience of aging women—that society has trained you to ignore. But it was also a critical aspect of the art.
I can’t just rely on the “good intentions” of the political message. The work must hold up visually. It must be compelling and add something to the development of art. The tipping point into straight activism happens when the work loses its ambiguity or its metaphorical resonance, when it is redundant or without meaning to the field. If a project offers only a single, didactic answer, it closes dialogue. Art, for me, is about opening a space for questions that don't have easy answers.
In Ahu Antmen’s text, the Second Wave feminist notion of “life material” is highlighted as central to your work — the use of daily experience, the body, craft, and forms associated with women's labor. What does “life material” mean to you today? And in which work did this approach first crystallize?
The term "life material" comes out of Second-Wave feminism, particularly in the 1970s, where we were rejecting the patriarchal notion that “high art” must be abstract, formal, and divorced from daily life. Performance during those years also emphasized using quotidian experiences as, or in, art. Allan Kaprow, with whom I studied, was particularly influential. Both women and men used the immediate, visceral, and often unacknowledged experiences of existence as the primary medium of the work, but with women those experiences had political implications having to do with the politicalization of the female body. Violence against women, for instance, was not generally regarded as a social problem before the 1970s. It took women sharing their experiences first with each other, in small groups, and then through art, writing, and activism, to raise it to global attention.
In my work life material encompasses several key elements: Daily Experience, which includes the invisibility of marginalized groups. The Body as a site of personal and political history —a body that ages, is subjected to violence, and performs labor. As Ahu points out, an underlying theme of early feminist art was the recuperation of labor historically relegated to the “minor” or “domestic”—like quilting—and placing them into the public, political, and aesthetic sphere of the museum. This opened a field of visual and processual metaphors for performance artists.
Violence as a theme emerged because of feminists’ growing awarenesses of the scale of the issue. Three Weeks in May (1977) was the largest and most public of these works at that time. This piece, performed in Los Angeles, was an immediate and visceral response to the terrifyingly high rates of rape in the city. I saw the work as a container, or platform, for individual, collective and mass audience interventions. I worked with the city for three weeks, to mark the exact location of every reported rape onto a large map of L.A. in a high-traffic area of City Hall. I updated this map daily and created a series of events and performances with activists, politicians and artists to focus on collective action and private grief. By translating the dry, bureaucratic statistics into a physical, visible marker on the body of the city, it became impossible to ignore. It took the hidden, private terror and made it a public, communal fact. The personal, it demonstrated, was indeed political.
Suzanne Lacy, Performance Suit, 1974, Painted body suit, © Suzanne Lacy
Works like Performance Suit, shown in the exhibition, challenge the historical role of the naked body and complicate the very idea of “the female body.” When you bring your early training in anatomy into dialogue with feminist politics, how does the body become an artistic tool, an archive, or even a site of social inquiry?
My early training in anatomy was not just about memorizing bones and muscles; it was about seeing the body as a structure of interconnected parts —a living system. Coming from my prior studies in medicine, the physicality of the body raised constant questions: how did it operate? What caused its complexity to fail, in the case of illness? Why did we associate looking at the inside of bodies —our own biological interiority— with violence? Having been inside the room for operations and autopsies, having photographed inside slaughterhouses and dissected fetal pigs, witnessing the interior of the body for me was an awesome aesthetic experience and a reminder of our complexity, humanity, and mortality. But I realized that it was not necessarily the way people outside the life sciences saw it.
In terms of feminist politics, I saw the body as an archive, a historical document where social and political forces leave their records. It is the repository of trauma, age, labor, and cultural expectations. I used it not as an object to be looked at (the historical, patriarchal gaze), but as a tool, a way to perform the work. In many early pieces like Performance Suit (which is in the Birlikte exhibition), I challenged the historical role of the naked female body in art. The body was a site of social inquiry, the starting point for asking big questions about power and identity. I invited the viewer to interrogate the body's context: Whose body is seen? And by whom? Whose body is protected, or tortured? Whose body is allowed to age, to protest, or to speak?
The body is the most immediate, accessible and high stakes medium we possess. In the 70s, performance art became a vehicle for women (along with men) to express themes in their daily lives. The most powerful artistic tool of performance was the simple, unadorned, and present body of the participant, and in that simple presence, women artists forced a conversation that was simultaneously personal, anatomical, historical, and deeply political.
Suzanne Lacy, By Your Own Hand, 2014-2015, Performance and video installation, © Suzanne Lacy
In projects like By Your Own Hand, in the exhibition, we encounter letters from women in Ecuador and other South American countries, but we also see similar experiences of violence reflected in Between the Door and the Street, in the U.S. The catalogue notes how similar these narratives are despite distance and context. How do you read this repetition? When stories of violence echo each other so closely, does local specificity still matter for you?
The question of repetition and violence against women is the problem we have not solved despite decades of political work. Feminists in the 70s began gathering stories around violence and survival around the world. The chilling consistency of these narratives is not a coincidence; it is evidence of a structural truth. This repetition tells us that we are not dealing with isolated, personal misfortunes; we are seeing the symptoms of a global, patriarchal apparatus that operates with a frightening universality. The violence, the lack of institutional support, and the burden of silence are tragically similar regardless of whether the woman is in Quito, Los Angeles or Istanbul.
Local specificity, however, matters. If the universality gives us the shared blueprint of oppression, the local context provides the immediate, actionable site of change. Different cultures have different forms of violence against women and different opportunities for action. The specificity of a particular place carries the weight of its own unique cultural history and legal system. The architecture of the spaces I work in—whether it’s a specific urban street or the Sakip Sananci Museum itself—provides a frame that grounds the action. The specificity of place supports visual forms of the work. The community—the women's groups, educators, artists and activists in Istanbul—are the ones who know how to translate the universal truth of violence into practical, local strategies for resistance. In the end, awareness of the repetition of violence creates the urgent sense of solidarity (Birlikte), but it is the local specificity that provides the necessary tools for change.
Suzanne Lacy, Between the Door and the Street, 2013, Performance and video installation, © Suzanne Lacy
Large-scale works such as Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, The Crystal Quilt, or Between the Door and the Street bring together hundreds of participants. When designing these projects, how do you build trust and a sense of safety for participants? What allows people to place their own stories within the structure you propose?
The question of trust in large-scale projects, which you’ve rightly identified in works like The Crystal Quilt or Between the Door and the Street, is not a technical concern; it is the ethical and artistic foundation of my practice. These are not projects about people; they are projects created with people, and the process of building a space where hundreds of individuals are willing to share their most personal, often painful, life material is an act of co-creation that requires meticulous planning and a deep commitment to reciprocity.
The primary way I build trust is by inverting the typical power dynamic of artist and subject. I do not begin with a finished script or a pre-determined narrative that I ask people to simply inhabit. I begin with a theme, often one suggested by those who invite me. I ask questions, invite participation, and work collectively to create a formal, aesthetic idea, one that is deliberately spacious, allowing participants to bring their own experience and perspective into the structure. For instance, with The Crystal Quilt, the strict formal parameters were temporal and visual - the tables, the soundtrack, the clothing, and the synchronized, slow movements—created by collaborations with artists and activists. Within those boundaries, 430 participants were given the absolute freedom and responsibility to speak for themselves. There are questions to structure the conversation, but what participants say is up to them.
The safety comes from knowing that their experience will not be co-opted, simplified, or edited to fit my agenda. When people are treated as co-authors, they recognize their own agency in the structure. The structure itself is designed to be a supportive vessel, a form of public scaffolding, ensuring that the personal story, once placed within the collective frame, is honored, protected, and given the volume it deserves. The risk is then shared, but the power, and the voice, remains fully theirs. There is a sense of solidarity and collective ownership.
The participants are not anonymous actors; they are collaborators who are fully informed about the work’s political and aesthetic goals and the potential risks of visibility. There is also a system of emotional and physical support built around the participants during the event itself, with rehearsals, conversations about safety, and communications media connecting a network of people who can intervene as needed. Physical and emotional security for participants is paramount in planning, where questions and disagreements become part of the process of working out differences.
Suzanne Lacy, Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, 1983-1984, Performance, © Suzanne Lacy
Your exhibition at Sakıp Sabancı Museum re-stages decades of public works through video and installation — what Antmen calls “the visible tip of a much larger iceberg.” What shifts when a collective action that once unfolded in public space reappears in a museum? In your view, how can the museum function as a second kind of public sphere?
The challenge of re-staging a piece of public performative art within the museum is precisely the shift from public event to public evidence. When an action unfolds in a public space, like a street corner or in a bull ring, it is inherently an act of direct political intervention – immediate, ephemeral, unpredictable, one that can be disrupted by unforeseen events. The museum, by contrast, is a controlled space of deliberate choice and contemplation. The fundamental aesthetic problems are these: how to capture the experience of a live performance and how to represent the myriad relational aspects of a long project with multiple events and actions (the ones that build community)?
When these works reappear in an exhibition like Birlikte / Togæther in Istanbul, there are two fundamental transformations that occur, and the museum must actively lean into them to become a “second kind of public sphere.” First, the museum must shift from being a container of objects to becoming an archive of process. The exhibition can’t just show the final photographs or video of The Crystal Quilt; it must also include the letters, the preparatory sketches, the community agreements, and the voices of the women who collaborated on it. Videos are the medium through which some of the energy and specificity of the original event are transferred.
Second, the museum must function as a pedagogical platform. The museum-based “public sphere” must be deliberate and generative. The audience is invited to witness not just the product, but the entire ethical and social framework that was necessary to build the work. This makes the museum a place where the methods of social practice are scrutinized. By careful curation and attention to audience experience, the museum retains the capacity to educate new generations and different cultures about social practice and the issues addressed in the work. In the context of Birlikte / Togæther, this means actively encouraging the contemporary Turkish public to draw parallels between the injustices shown in the pieces and the struggles they face today. The museum becomes a protected space—a kind of laboratory or classroom—where difficult, nuanced conversations can be held. The artwork includes the activated dialogue that occurs in front of it. It moves from being an object of contemplation to being a tool for ongoing social inquiry.
Suzanne Lacy, A Gothic Love Story, 1975-1976, Photo series, © Suzanne Lacy
Your exhibition aligns with the Sabancı Foundation’s long-standing focus on gender equality and women’s empowerment. During your time here, what did Istanbul reveal to you about women’s experiences today — about care, discrimination, solidarity? How did the idea of “togetherness” resonate within the local landscape?
The Foundation’s longstanding commitment to gender equality creates a vital context for the museum itself, positioning the exhibition not just as a historical display, but as an active engagement with the ongoing work of women's empowerment in Turkey. What showing in Istanbul revealed is not a unique set of problems, but a profound and inspiring local resilience in how the universal struggles—the discrimination, the struggle for care, the search for safety—are faced. A group of Ahu's graduate students produced their own project focused on embodied politics and staging collectivity, and the more than 700 questions gathered from the local audience during the exhibition became the trigger for a theatre performance by the director Ayşe Draz. The artist Huo Rf organized a book club gathering on aging. And the exhibition hosted the United Nations Women Europe and Central Asia's 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence campaign.
The concept of Togætherness resonated with a deeply felt need to overcome polarization and to find common ground for solidarity among women navigating complex social and political spaces. The local response amplified the very thesis of the show: that the power of collective presence—the mere fact of showing up together, which is what Birlikte means—is the first, and perhaps most enduring, act of resistance. It confirms that the greatest resource for social change is always the community itself, and that the museum, by providing a protected space for these difficult histories to be shared, becomes an essential tool for local empowerment.
Suzanne Lacy, Cold Hands, Warm Heart, ykş./ca. 1975, Photo series, © Suzanne Lacy
The gatherings in your work — across ages, classes, and backgrounds — generate a sense of unity that is both fragile and powerful. What does “being together” mean for you aesthetically? When shaping a performance, how do you envision or choreograph the emotional world of that togetherness?
“Being together” is the most challenging and rewarding aspect of my process. It is about creating an image of solidarity that is both formally precise and emotionally resonant, transforming raw, personal vulnerability into a controlled public event. I am not interested in merely gathering people and certainly not in exposing them as victims. I am interested in how the formalization of their presence changes the political meaning of their converging experiences. The performance must allow vulnerability to be expressed without exposing any single individual unduly, but also power and agency. The collective action acts as a protective shield; your personal story is safe because it is merged into a chorus of hundreds of voices, yet it is powerfully visible because that chorus has strength in numbers: you are not alone. Aesthetically, "being together" demands a visual precision necessary to convert hundreds of individual experiences into a collective, authoritative statement. The togetherness is fragile because the material is personal and sometimes difficult but the long preparation period results in a collective sense of purpose.
“Social practice” has become a widely used, and sometimes diluted, label in the art world. As both a pioneer and a teacher, what would you want young artists visiting this exhibition to take away? Which principle from your experience still feels essential for the next generation working with social practice?
The term “social practice” has become a kind of shorthand for any art that interacts with community. This work takes many different forms. As someone who has been navigating this territory for five decades, I would want young artists visiting Birlikte / Togæther to grasp the principle that remains the absolute core of the work, the one essential requirement: Ethical and aesthetic rigor are inseparable.
For the next generation working in social practice, the fundamental principle you must carry is that your good intentions are not enough to make good art. When a project is based on the actual, often traumatic, experiences of real people, you have an ethical obligation to treat that material with the highest level of care. The aesthetic rigor, the formal control, the precise choreography, and the beautiful framing are not additions; they are the ethical tools that protect the vulnerability of the participants' stories and give them a powerful public presence.
When a young artist plans an action, they must ask not just, “Will this serve the community?” but also, “Is the formal structure—the video, the sound, the way people are grouped—strong enough to hold the weight of this material and transform it into something you might call art?” Without this rigor and attention to detail, the work risks becoming either diluted, simplistic activism or, worse, exploitative documentation that takes the participants' energy without giving them a lasting, powerful artistic voice in return. Good social practice art must achieve both political efficacy and artistic power simultaneously, or it achieves neither. The lesson is that the quality of your art and the quality of your ethics are one and the same.
In its new era, the Sakıp Sabancı Museum opens the very concept of the “museum” up for debate. We spoke with Museum Director Prof. Dr. Ahu Antmen, who set a clear stance immediately upon taking office with the Suzanne Lacy exhibition, which centers on participation and social justice. Reading the concept of “being museum-like” in reverse, positioning the institution not as an authority but as a “stakeholder,” and aiming to transform exhibition halls into a living “agora,” Antmen described SSM’s new roadmap, the future of the collection, and the resistance of being “together” in the digital age to Unlimited. This interview acts as a critical complement to understanding the curatorial and institutional vision behind Suzanne Lacy’s Togæther exhibition
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