"Always Here" Exhibition Event

Speakers: Esra Aliçavuşoğlu, Öykü Özsoy Sağnak

Moderator: Deniz Pehlivaner

A series of talks will be held on the occasion of the exhibition "Always Here", which consists of works included in the collection with the support of the Women Artists Fund, established in 2016 as part of Istanbul Modern with the aim of supporting the work of women artists in Türkiye, increasing their recognition and strengthening the representation of women artists by adding new works to the museum's collection. The first event of the series will be a talk titled "The Woman Artist’s Gaze", moderated by curator Deniz Pehlivaner, with Prof. Esra Aliçavuşoğlu and exhibition curator Öykü Özsoy Sağnak as speakers.

In the talk, Prof. Esra Aliçavuşoğlu will present examples from the historical process and the artworks,and open up the subject matter of the exhibition for discussion, while exhibition curator Öykü Özsoy Sağnak will explain the conceptual framework of the exhibition through the works and the participating artists.

According to Prof. Esra Aliçavuşoğlu, a particularly important phenomenon for contemporary art in Türkiye is the fact that women artists regard art as a field of struggle, and that they use their powers of observation, intuition, and perception, rather than a destructive, aggressive tone, to subvert gender codes. The woman artist's gaze is more easily directed both inwards towards herself and outwards towards the other, and bears a criticism, questioning and analysis in which she involves herself as well. The struggle of women artists in Türkiye does not happen on one side of a limiting and exclusionary canon; it is possible to trace a feminist consciousness, a body-affirming attitude towards gender politics, a political, ideological, environmentalist, in short, a plural, multi-layered expression in the practice of almost every woman artist.

Öykü Özsoy Sağnak points out that the artists in the exhibition “Always Here" share with us powerful examples of today's art with the diversity of the subjects of their artistic output, the variety of their techniques and materials, and their care and courage in creating their unique artistic languages. She emphasizes that bearing witness to the era they live in, these artists raise their voices against all kinds of discrimination and inequality, and convey in their works migration and the resulting problems, concepts such as power and belonging, the relationships between memory, space, and historiography, and the destruction caused by ecological disasters.

Prof. Esra Aliçavuşoğlu is a faculty member at the Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts. After graduating from the Istanbul University Faculty of Letters Department of Art History, she received her Master’s and PhD degrees from the same university. In 2000, she attended courses in “Curatorial Studies” at the University of The Arts London Central Saint Martins, and in 2016, she conducted research on contemporary art museums in New York with a TÜBİTAK scholarship. In 2022, she worked as a guest researcher at the invitation of the Pratt Institute Department of History of Art and Design in New York with another TÜBİTAK scholarship. A member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), Aliçavuşoğlu has published papers andreviews in various academic publications, as well as monographs on artists. She is the co-editor with Ayşe Köksal of the “Türkiye’de Sanatın Tarihi” (“History of Art in Türkiye”) series published by Can Publishing in the "Tellekt" series. Müze (Museum), the first book of the series,was published in 2023. Aliçavuşoğlu also co-edited with Ali Artun the book Bauhaus: Modernleşmenin Tasarımı (Bauhaus: The Design of Modernization) in 2009

The event is free of charge.

The conversation will be held in Turkish.