29 Jan - 05 Mar 2016
The 6th solo-exhibition of young super-talent Sena titled "6" will be on exhibit at The Empire Project Gallery between 29.01 - 05.03.2016. The subtitle of the exhibition is "Çeyiz / Dowry". The works in the exhibition are influenced directly from the traditional heritage of handcrafts and materials of Anatolia and here the artist has prepared her own artistic Dowry.
"Dowry" underlines issues that have been at the core of her artistic practice from the very beginning; the dynamics of female/male relationships, marriage, religion, sex, birth, child brides, domestic violence, traditional moral observance and community pressure.
In essence the stories that have permeated and invaded the daily lives of those living in this part of the world for hundreds of years.
The flowers, designs and patterns that the Anatolian woman works into her dowry symbolizes her imagination, her passion and most important of all her hopes. Though her departure from hearth of her father with her dowry laden with soft sweet embroidered dreams of her future generally transitions into the sad reality of a brutalized woman. The measure of her worth bartered away for a livestock, a few pieces of gold or if she's very lucky a refrigerator. But this story also concerns the men of this land. Crushed beneath the expectancy of his community, forced to live within the parameters of the "proper" life, to marry and make a family with a woman who is a stranger to him and the children who are strangers to them both.
"In this corner of the world, bounty and the wasteland can be found in the same place-and all of us are wounded.
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