Guerrilla Girls, 1985

The Guerrilla Girls was founded in 1985 after a number of artists and critics realized that only 13 of the 169 artists featured in the exhibition “An International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York were women. This discovery prompted people to begin asking questions about what needed to be done to address the problem of gender discrimination in the world of art. These questions also led to the birth of the group that identifies itself as “Guerrilla Girls”.

The Guerrilla Girls draw attention to sexism and discrimination not only in the art world and the motion picture industry, but also in official cultural policy where it is surprisingly pervasive. The Guerrilla Girls’ weapons of choice are posters, stickers, books, printed matter and performances. The Guerrilla Girls prefer to base their criticism on incidents and events that can be backed up by statistical data. The group prepared the poster, “The Future for Turkish Women Artists as revealed to the Guerrilla Girls”, for the Venice-İstanbul exhibition. Dripping with characteristic irony, the poster underscores the institutional and ideological realities of a problem that has not, so far, been given much attention in Turkey.