To Play With or a Doll's House

The Gallery space was used as a private house by Sultan Abdul-Aziz during the Ottoman era. ‘These women’, identities of whom we will never know and can only guess what they have lived were women who had neither identities nor a language to speak in. I have used the images of naked women depicted by an Italian painter as a representation of “these women”. Using the bed I located under the paintings on the ceiling and the mirror I placed on the bed, I brought them back to life the way they were.

The text written on the red drapery in the manual alphabet tells us of the stories of these women that have not made it to our day. It was my intention to establish an empathy between the viewers and those women by having the viewers experience the tension resulting from not being able to read the text on the drapery.

The space, which used to be “A Doll’s House” for those women was recreated using dolls in reference to Ibsen’s play of the same name.

The pushchair and the bed, the women depictions on the ceiling, the text written in the manual alphabet and the dolls, opened themselves to new interpretations in a way that will form new games and questions with their interbedded symbolic meanings.

 

Nazan Azeri