İstanbul Kadın Müzesi

ESRA YILDIZ

Çalışmayı indirmek için tıklayınız Çalışmayı izlemek için tıklayınız

Çalışmanın Özeti

This thesis aims to analyze the works of contemporary women artists in Turkey from the end of 1960s and 1970s to 2000s through gender studies and gender concepts, and thus it aims to point out how women artists resist gender identities, gender norms with their works and their important roles in forming contemporary art in Turkey.

In 1960s and 1970s in the West, when Second Wave Feminism and feminist art emerged, women artists criticized both their invisibility in art history even if they were very active in the art scene and the patriarchal language of visual culture. In those years women artists without being a part of women?s movement like in western countries gave parallel examples on the subject. Because Turkey was seen as a non-western country, this situation prevented the practices and works of women artists to be analyzed in the same period. It can be seen that in 1970s and especially in 1980s, women artists gave similar examples in the context of feminist art without being a part of women?s movement.

In the first chapter, considering the problematics of contemporary history writing, the exclusion of women artists in recent publications, exhibitions and art scene would be analyzed and the gendered language in those publications would be considered as a factor to reproduce women?s exclusion in art. The hierarchy in history writing is aimed to be underlined and criticized by referring her story instead of his story. In the second chapter, at first, the period from westernization to 1960s, and then from 1970s to 2000s the works of women artists and women positions in art are broadly analyzed in a sociological and historical way. Until 1960s, women artists try to struggle against gender identities without making their ontological problems as their subject matter of the works, and thus they pave the way that goes to 1970s.

By the seventies, a new period in which women?s subjects matters are differenciated, identity politics are critized in the works, and the quantity of women artists increase begin. In the next chapter, the works of women artists after 1970s would be analyzed from the perspective of gender studies and through the concepts like body, body politics, woman body and sexuality, spatiality (imprisonment, patriarchy, antimilitarism&nation state, nationalism&its criticism, art institutions&its criticism, family as an institution, masculinity etc.), race, class (woman and migration, orientalism and woman). Since gender and feminist theories are about the analyzing power relationships in the fields they are used.