ARTS AND CULTURE
A retrospective exhibition of works by eminent Turkish contemporary artist İpek Duben, The Skin, Body, and I is being held at SALT Beyoğlu from December 6, 2021 to April 3, 2022. The exhibition provides an opportunity to review Duben’s artistic career, spanning forty years.
Duben had an interesting transition to creating art full-time: “My awareness of social and political problems was founded and enriched by many years of graduate study in political science and psychology at the University of Chicago, as well as my love of philosophy. I decided to leave social sciences at a critical moment in 1970 at the end of my fieldwork for my Ph.D. dissertation about the growth of fundamentalist Islam and its impact on politics in Turkey. I felt that I didn’t want to continue my life as an academic scholar, that I could be more myself if I could make art. My good friend Kuzgun Acar helped me take my first steps, and in 1971 I went to New York to study art.”
Duben’s work focuses on themes like identity, morality, and memory: “These issues are related to each other; in order to know who I am, I have to know how similar or different I am from others. My first exhibition upon my return to İstanbul was Şerife (1981-82). I knew Şerife, a migrant from an Anatolian village who worked as a housekeeper in Istanbul. Her refusal to pose for a portrait because of moral restraints led me to substitute a generic dress donned by women in her condition to represent her. A series of twelve dresses with nothing other than the company label, Oğuzlar, to define Şerife’s identity became an iconic representation of ‘headless’ and ‘nameless’ women in our male-dominant traditional culture. Today Şerife is viewed as a groundbreaking feminist work.
“I questioned male violence against women (LoveBook and LoveGame 2000-2001), identity issues such as, ‘who am I?’ (Manuscript 1994), how the ‘other’, the West, identified Turks in history (what is a Turk?), how we identify our own ‘others’ and how these people identify and describe each other in conventionally coded and most often prejudiced terms (They/Onlar 2015), suppressing the ‘self’ (Who’s Who/Kim Kimdir).
“Underlying descriptions of identity, of the ‘self’ and the ‘other’ lie larger issues like how social and political justice are applied to citizens of a nation and how nations distribute justice within the international community. An obvious manifestation of the latter is the way powerful and over-consuming societies handle the deadly realities of the health epidemic and world-wide migration (Farewell My Homeland 2004-2018).”
Duben recalls her years at ACG with fondness: “I developed long- lasting friendships. I loved my teachers - Dr. Sipfle, Dr. Davidson (Mrs.) and Dr. Haines. They opened my eyes to a new world of possibilities, raised my awareness and made me fall in love with poetry. When I look down the hill from the Plateau and breathe in the beauty of the Bosphorus, ACG still holds the promise of heaven for me.”
Published February 2022
