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| author |
Sudenaz Yilmaz
| | title |
"Tradition" as a Site for Feminist Intervention in Modern and Contemporary Art in Türkiye: Maide Arel (1907-1997), Gülsün Karamustafa (b. 1946), Canan (b. 1970)
| | abstract |
Modernism in Türkiye developed in alignment with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's (1881–1938) nation-building project, which sought to construct a Westernized, modern, secular, and symbolically monoethnic Republic (1923) following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922). Central to this vision was the use of visual art to break from the Ottoman past and articulate a new national identity rooted in Western European modernist forms. Within the Republican ideology, while an assumed, authentic "Turkish culture" was seen as a source for subject matter compatible with Western modernist visual language, Ottoman cultural heritage—shaped by various ethnicities and the Empire's Islamic and Eastern domains—was deemed backward, ill-fitting for modernism, or more commonly, "traditional." This binary between tradition and modernity has continued to influence the trajectory of art in Türkiye throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. This thesis is grounded in the observation that art historical accounts of Turkish modernism's negotiations with "tradition" often center male artists and rely on romanticized or conformist frameworks such as sentez [synthesis], which presume a harmonious blending of Western modernism and Turkish national identity. In contrast, employing feminism's "standpoint theory," this study identifies a persistent feminist trajectory in which female artists in Türkiye—long positioned as ideological symbols within the tradition-modernity binary—have actively engaged with "tradition" to destabilize the binary itself. Through case studies of Maide Arel (1907–1997), Gülsün Karamustafa (b. 1946), and Canan (b. 1970), it traces how female artists across generations have redefined "tradition" as a critical and generative site of agency and feminist intervention according to their respective historical and socio-political contexts. Ultimately, understanding how these artists' feminist interventions to the tradition-modernity binary intersect with broader structures of gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and class will be essential to reframing Turkish modernism as part of an inclusive and critically engaged global modernist discourse.
| | school |
The College of Liberal Arts, Drew University
| | degree |
B.A. (2025)
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| advisor |
Kimberly Rhodes
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| full text | SYilmaz.pdf |
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