" Irem "

The backbone of Eylul Cekic’s video is the construction of art history on the male gaze and the relationship between the artist and the model.

 

In her video, Cekic transposes some prominent paintings in art history that were “sensational” in their time for being centered on female nudity with the nude body of a young woman colleague in a bathtub, reflecting on the reduction of the female body to an object of desire. The artist questions whether the owner of the gaze, as a woman, re-produces the same male gaze despite her gender, and as she looks at her friend Irem’s body, she realizes that she has a gaze which reduces Irem to her body rather than considering her in her selfness, thereby establishing power over her. Instead of emancipating the female body, this gaze destroys its selfness and attributes a host of new meanings or qualifiers, and gains a new level of meaning with the informed consent form that Irem reads aloud, saying she has waived all her rights.

 

The objective of the two young artists’ work is to generate a critical reading of being a woman in the world of art (either as artist or object) and assert the need for a free, original, completely new perspective on issues related to being a woman.