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Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 24.1 (2003) 19-37



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Public Politics and Domestic Rituals
Contemporary Art by Women in Turkey, 1980-2000

Susan N. Platt

[Figures]

Transparent dress-like sculptures by Turkish artist Suzi Hug-Levy made of wire, mesh, gauze, paper, felt, copper, or rubber hang from the ceiling of her studio in a chic district of Istanbul. They cast intricate but ephemeral shadows on the walls, floor, and ceiling.

In a former monastery in central Istanbul, Inci Eviner creates torso-shaped leather forms that she has attached to a ladder. Sometimes the leather hangs like a shepherd's cloak over sheets of copper cut to suggest steep hills. On the copper, the artist has painted small uprooted fragments of bodies, hands, cone-shaped figures with legs, snakes, extinct animals, pottery, tools, huts, tents, and trees. Odd three-dimensional leather shapes that resemble elongated body parts seem to grow out of a copper table with a spinal cord painted on it.

These are some of the contemporary artworks that I encountered in Istanbul during a visit funded by a Fulbright Fellowship in 1999-2000. Since there is no contemporary art museum in Turkey (although there are ongoing efforts to create one), I made repeated visits to artists' studios to view this art. In order to decipher these enigmatic works I also had to delve deeply into Turkish politics and history. However, complete understanding often seemed to elude me, partly because of the language differences and partly because of the complexity of Turkish life and the labyrinth of issues to which the works refer.

It was always tempting to interpret the art from my own perspective, but invariably the cultural specificity of the references revealed themselves as I looked more deeply. For example, Hug-Levy's dangling mesh garments can be related to American artists who explore concerns about dress. However, the artist told me her work is a personal response to the rise of Islamism (or political Islam) in Turkey. She was inspired to make these garments when she overheard an imam (a leader of prayers in a mosque) saying that the appropriate place for women was in the home.

Her shroud-like forms signify the isolation of women by tradition and taboo. In spite of allusions to an identifiable type of clothing such as the [End Page 19] [Begin Page 21] peasant shalwar(a type of loose-fitting pants), the garments invoke confinement. There is a striking contradiction between the garment and its shadowy partner, the contrast of the material and the immaterial, of this world and the other world. The shadow sometimes towers over the dress, like a celestial guardian. To understand these shadows, as well as their frequent appearance in the work of other Turkish artists, it is useful to know that Islamic tradition emphasizes shadows. In Islamic thought the visible "face" of reality is a shadow of a larger reality that only Allah can perceive.

Another artist, Inci Eviner, told me that her work addresses her own experience of the tensions between traditional and contemporary life as she observed it growing up as the daughter of a wealthy farmer near Ankara. Her references to nature and myth on the one hand and to the body and the nervous system on the other bring together two different worlds—the old and the modern—in an uncomfortable pairing. Placed in the larger context of Turkish twentieth-century history, Eviner's sculpture expresses the painful conflicts between social expectations and public rhetoric experienced by women in Turkish society. 1

In contrast to work by many contemporary American artists, Turkish artists almost always address political and social issues that concern the entire country, or draw on Turkish history and myth. Only rarely do they paint private stories or psychic traumas. The purpose of this article is to begin the process of placing these works in the larger arena of contemporary Turkey. I have divided the article into two parts. The first part examines artists who address political events with...

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