Artist Unknown* İvi was Here, conceived and directed by Elif Sözer and Zeynep Özden, brings the largely erased story of painter İvi Stangali to the stage as part of the 30th Istanbul Theatre Festival, organised by IKSV. The production will be presented at Arter Karbon on Tuesday 3 November and Wednesday 4 November, followed by a performance at Bakırköy Leyla Gencer Opera & Arts Center on Tuesday 17 November. Combining biographical theatre with questions of memory, displacement and cultural erasure, the production revisits the life of an artist whose work and name were gradually pushed out of the cultural record after her forced departure in 1964. Tickets are available via Passo.
Born in 1922, Stangali studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in the studio of Bedri Rahmi Eyüboğlu and became a founding member of the Onlar Group, an important collective in the development of modern Turkish painting during the late 1940s and 1950s. She also illustrated the first editions of the Iliad in Turkish and maintained a significant presence in the artistic life of her generation. Her career was interrupted when she was forced to leave for Athens in 1964 with her one-year-old daughter. She could take little with her beyond personal notebooks from her studies, while paintings she attempted to send after her departure were lost.
The circumstances of Stangali’s disappearance from the record give the production its central tension. A painting carrying her name on its reverse was later exhibited for years under the label “Artist Unknown”, a detail that became emblematic of the wider erasure of her work and identity. Rather than treating this history as a conventional biography, the production moves between fragments of memory, lost paintings, unfinished works and different versions of Stangali herself.
Tilbe Saran, Fulya Peker and Çağdaş Ekin Şişman perform different stages and facets of Stangali’s life, while Çiğdem Erdöl’s text builds a theatrical structure around absence as much as biography. Music and sound design by Şahin Kureta, along with video design by Can Memişoğulları, contribute to a production concerned not only with reconstructing one artist’s story, but with examining how cultural memory is shaped, whose histories survive, and what it means to recover a name that has been deliberately obscured. The 17 November performance will include English surtitles.
To stay up to date and more information make sure to follow 30th Istanbul Theatre Festival and IKSV. Tickets are available via Passo. Tickets are available via Passo.
