“Turkish lady is the ornament of her house…”

“I don’t believe in the equality of men and women... Men and women are different. They are each other’s complementary.”

And so, in 2018 the body of work has bifurcated to house a non-equal but complementary counterpart to the Monuments: a set of golden mouth Ornaments that cage the lips of its wearer in motifs from tezhip - an Ottoman manuscript Illumination style. A parallel is drawn between the relationship of tezhip and text, and that of “Woman” and “Man” for as Turkish Woman ornaments the house of her man, tezhip ornaments the house of the word, the page.

Delicate, seductive, valuable in material and silencing, these beautiful gags confirm women’s exclusion from the linguistic realm, marginalization and ornamentalization within history

(see Monument I, II, III-V for the previous sections of Kelimeler Kıyafetsiz (:Words Naked/Are Not Enough project statement)

The 2018 iterations of Kelimeler Kıyafetsiz (:Words Naked/Are Not Enough), Monument III , IV and V take the form of obelisks comparable to the one of Pharaoh Thutmose III transported to and re-erected in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. From the Washington Monument in D.C. to the Trajan's Column in Rome, phallic monuments have been built and displaced throughout history as markers of power/conquest.

(see Monument I & II for the previous sections of Kelimeler Kıyafetsiz (:Words Naked/Are Not Enough project statement)

The 2018 iterations of Kelimeler Kıyafetsiz (:Words Naked/Are Not Enough), Monument III , IV and V take the form of obelisks comparable to the one of Pharaoh Thutmose III transported to and re-erected in the Hippodrome of Constantinople. From the Washington Monument in D.C. to the Trajan's Column in Rome, phallic monuments have been built and displaced throughout history as markers of power/conquest.

(see Monument I & II  for the previous sections of Kelimeler Kıyafetsiz (:Words Naked/Are Not Enough project statement)

Kelimeler Kıyafetsiz (:Words Naked/Are Not Enough) is a research project on representations of women in political speech from Turkey wherein quotes that refer to women are extracted from the public speeches of current Turkish politicians and re-presented in archeological forms that have historically celebrated male glory.

In 2014, the collection of quotes were formed into 10 writing stones, Monument I, visually drawing from Orkhon Inscriptions: bilingually inscribed Turkic artifacts erected to glorify 8th Century Göktürk Princes.

My family, and the practices of women in my family, are things that I hold very dear to my heart; these small bits of ephemeral information are building blocks of larger, enduring concepts that give way to monumental work. 

Grandmother Series (Anneanne Serisi) is an intimate body of work that records my Grandmother, Neriman Aydin’s stories, dreams, obsessions, loves and traumas in objects. 

Grandmother Series is comprised of small scale, simple and domestic materials and working methods, as well as found or acquired objects and non-objects (practices, Oral histories, prayers.) I sculpt these physical and abstract artifacts into my work as research “data”, the meaning of which I have expanded to include objects that have gained specific significance through experience. When worn to a funeral, a piece of black cloth is elevated to a signifier of time; stones and fruit pits my grandmother brings back from a pilgrimage to Mecca into that of faith; pricked into drywall, sewing needles become documentations of waiting. I build these objects into the series to widen in space and solidify in time the active states of such object’s fleeting stories.