About the Work

The artist kneels in a pile of pork from a freshly slaughtered pig. She wears safety goggles and rubber gloves which refer to the Islamic law forbidding the touching and eating of pork. She holds up pieces of meat and sniffs at them as if to ascertain why the law exists. The sound of her breathing is amplified by a microphone and is clearly audible throughout the room. The work is a direct reference to her piece No Pork but Pig (2004) in which she spent several hours in a small pen with a living pig.

Throughout Ekici’s performance practice, she again and again confronts the image of a woman and an artist caught between cultures. Born not far from Ankara, socialised within the narrow circle of her Turkish family in Germany, she explores the limits of what is physically possible in her projects, radically committing her own body to her artworks. In Flesh, (No Pig but Pork), she targets the taboos and traditional rituals of the Islamic world, donning Lady Justice‘s blindfold, a black leotard and yellow rubber gloves to wallow in pork meat, sniffing the forbidden raw flesh. Presented here in POINTS of RESISTANCE: Skills for Peace, at a time when war has inconceivably broken out in Europe once more, this work transforms from grotesque to tragic. In the face of bombs falling on residential streets, we could all be piles of flesh, meat torn asunder by violence. Lady Justice could well be asking, what could possible justify that?

About the Artist

Nezaket Ekici (born in Kirsehir, Turkey in 1970) is an international performance artist. She holds an M.A. in Art Pedagogy, and studied Art History and Sculpture at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University and Fine Arts Academy Munich (1994-2000). From 2001 to 2004 she studied Performance Art under Marina Abramović at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig. She received a degree in Fine Arts as well as an MFA degree. Ekici has been presenting her work in national and international exhibitions since 2000: Museum Haus der Kunst in Munich; The Irish Museum of Modern art in Dublin; 25. May Museum Belgrade; PAC Milano; Venice Biennale; P.S.1 New York; Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam; Reina Sophia Museum, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul; The Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei/ Taiwan; Poznan Biennale; Curiciba Biennale; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Istanbul Modern; Marta Herford; Minsheng Art Museum Shanghai; Haus am Waldsee Berlin; KunstWerke Berlin; Oslo Museum; The Contemporary Art Gallery of Georgia, Georgia National Museum, Tbilisi; Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow, Total Museum Seoul. In 2013/2014, she was an artist in Residency at the Cultural Academy Tarabya in Istanbul and in 2016/2017, she got the Rome Prize and was an artist in Residency at the German Academy Villa Massimo in Rome. In 2018 she received the Paula Modersohn-Becker Art Award, and In 2020 she was an artist in residency at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, New York, sponsored by the International Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Berlin. Ekici’s work includes mainly performance, video and installation. She presented more than 250 different performances in over 60 countries, more than 170 cities on 4 continents. She lives and works in Berlin, Stuttgart and Istanbul.