Lill Yildiz Yalcin

The artist grew up in Oslo, in a multicultural family. With a background as an activist and street artist, she gives her works strong meanings related to the outside space. She has been presenting art regularly since 2006, and has also worked as a curator since 2017. Her sculptures, installations and jewelry are performative in nature and address issues related to public and private space, as well as institutional critique and social ecology. With recycled materials and a penchant for reinforcing steel, the artist manages to combine issues of urban everyday life with current political concerns. She earned a master’s degree from the Oslo Academy of Art (specialization: art in public space) and a bachelor’s degree in jewelry art.

Summary of residency

Yildiz spent the first part of her residency researching stories about human relationships with other animals. The people she met in various circumstances inspired her with their often surprising accounts. She documented them in the form of both audio recordings and drawings – visual notes.

The artist sees the animal world as parallel to the human world. The two sometimes intersect and meet. For this reason, the animals that she finds most fascinating are those that coexist with us daily. In Wrocław, she noticed a particularly intense presence of rats – a species generally considered harmful, marginalised, and exterminated; outcasts of a system they do not fit into.

Inspirations

Stories she had heard as well as her experience of the city itself, inspired her to create an object out of reinforced steel acquired from Wrocław’s demolition sites. The artist gave it new meanings by bending it into animal shapes and then combining them all into one hybrid form, resembling a cage and being its contradiction at the same time. For Yildiz, the very process of sourcing the material needed to create the object and its properties was important. The artist often works with reinforced steel and this time too she used this material, which is originally the basis for the construction of buildings. She treats steel as a symbolic element, referring to how society is constructed, through the norms and rules that are the basis of it. Creating from steel bars, and giving them new shapes in the process of bending and welding them, is a subversive gesture, driven by the need to undermine the rules. It is also a kind of negotiation with the material, testing the limits of its flexibility.

The artist developed her works in the MiserArt space in Wrocław’s Nadodrze district.