01/09/2025
The Sabancı University Sakıp Sabancı Museum will host American artist and educator Suzanne Lacy (b. 1945). For more than fifty years, Suzanne Lacy has held a prominent place in the international art world with her large-scale performances centering on women’s social experiences. Her exhibition Birlikte/ Togaether, presented with the support of the Sabancı Foundation, esteemed for advancing social progress toward a more equitable and sustainable future, will open on September 12 at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum.
Since the 1970s, Suzanne Lacy has been acclaimed as a seminal figure in feminist art for her sustained focus on women and social experience. Anchored in civic participation and forms of collective agency, she is widely regarded as a progenitor of “new genre public art.” Her exhibition at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum will, for the first time in Turkey, bring together an extensive selection of her video installations and collaborative works.
Suzanne Lacy’s practice brings visibility to women’s experiences of identity, freedom, violence, labor, and aging, while convening artists, scholars, municipalities, and activists to foster robust debate on gendered social systems. Spanning decades, these projects are presented within the museum space through large-scale video installations that engage the viewer as both witness and participant.
Through this exhibition—at once aesthetic and political—the Sakıp Sabancı Museum seeks to highlight the power of museums to engage with pressing social issues; to draw audiences into dialogue with the social dimensions of contemporary art; and to underscore the responsibility and influence of artists in this field.
Over the span of the exhibition, Suzanne Lacy’s artistic practice will be examined in depth through a constellation of workshops, pedagogical programs for children, and scholarly conferences. The program will open on Saturday, September 13, at 2:00 p.m., with an artist talk in which Suzanne Lacy will engage in conversation with Prof. Ahu Antmen, Manager of the Sakıp Sabancı Museum.
Suzanne Lacy’s Birlikte/Togaether exhibition will remain on view at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum through December 14, 2025.
Artist Portrait
Fotoğraf /Photograph: © Brittney Valdez
Caption
Whisper, the Waves, the Wind, 1983–1984
Performance
© Suzanne Lacy
