Immigrant Skins, Gendered Bodies
Evren Savcı
Translation: Çağla Özbek
Published by Salt as a continuation of the exhibition of the same title, which ran from December 9, 2021 to May 8, 2022 at Salt Beyoğlu, İpek Duben: The Skin, Body, and I stands apart from typical “coffee table” art books which often feature little more than a hastily written foreword accompanying an aesthetically pleasing selection of the artist’s works printed on glossy paper.
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Identity, Art and Freedom of Artistic Creativity: Şerife
Part 1
Turgut Tarhanlı
Translation: Çağla Özbek
This article is the transcript of Prof. Turgut Tarhanlı's talk delivered at Salt Galata on 26 March 2024, as part of the publication “İpek Duben: The Skin, Body, and I,” which was held at Salt Galata with contributions by Esen Karol and Çağla Özbek. The event can be watched on Salt’s YouTube channel.
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Identity, Art and Freedom of Artistic Creativity: Manuscript 1994
Part 2
Turgut Tarhanlı
Translation: Çağla Özbek
The following text is from a paper delivered by Prof. Turgut Tarhanlı at a panel discussion with Esen Karol and Çağla Özbek on the occasion of the book launch of İpek Duben:The Skin, Body and I at Salt Galata on March 26,2024.
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Send Me
a Postcard:
the Jests of İpek Duben
Matt Manson
SHE matches. A blue-haired 79-yearold sporting a neckline adorned with a chain mesh resembling repurposed plastic clips, İpek Duben sits atop the Juma building in Karaköy behind glass windows, comfortably adorned in a fuzzy, azure sweater. Hers is the art of a storied satirist, whimsical at heart and on the surface, but rough around the edges when bristled.
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İpek Duben: They/Onlar
Virginia Whiles
İpek Duben is surely the Grande Dame of the Turkish art World: a feminist activist artist of 75 who is still producing provocative work in a career spanning four decades. Showing all over the world, formerly as a painter, always a writer, her practice today involves artists’ books, video and installation.
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İpek Duben The Skin, Body, and I
Bala Gürcan
"The Skin, Body, and I" at SALT Beyoğlu provided the most comprehensive coverage of Turkish artist İpek Duben's fruitful, four-decade-plus practice to date, revealing the wide span of cultural and political themes that continue to permeate her multidisciplinary oeuvre. Presenting unflinching social critique on gender inequality, forced migration, and capitalist exploitation through the image of the human body...
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In via incognita
Gemma Padley
Stepping inside Pi Artworks’s latest solo exhibition featuring the work of Turkish multimedia artist Ipek Duben is a strange and disconcerting, troubling, even, experience. As you leave behind the hustle and bustle of London’s Fitzrovia, Duben transports the viewer into a world of silent screams and desperate realities where unrealised hopes and stolen dreams abound.
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İpek Duben a Selection: 1994-2009
Robert C. Morgan
Duben functions as an artist with a nomadic instinct. Given the range of her experience and intellect, I believe Duben has emerged as an important trans- cultural artist, not just a Turkish one. She is an artist motivated to tell the truth through subjective memory, perception, and insight about the fate of a woman...
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They/Onlar
Kaya Genç
"Hell is other people," mused French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in a widely misunderstood line from his one-act play "No Exit." Sartre later explained what he meant by those words: "If relations with someone else are twisted, vitiated, then that other person can only be hell. Why? Because when we think about ourselves, when we try to know ourselves, we use the knowledge of us which other people already have.
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Manuscript 1994
Ali Akay
İpek A. Duben’s “Manuscript 1994” shown last month in Istanbul and this month in Ankara, made me think of Karl Marx’s 1884 Manuscripts and the intense discussion following their publication as well as the post-structuralist formulations of Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida concerning Mallarme and conceiving of the world as a book, and Deleuie and Guattari's opposition to Chomsky with their idea of a 'nomadic and homeless book'.
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İpek Duben: Dealing with issues within a multi-dimentional perspective
Işıl Aydemir
"Throughout your artistic practice spanning 40 years, you have dealt with a myriad of social issues including gender, identity politics, violence and immigration in your work. Now within the scope of your current retrospective exhibition, all of these..."
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[In Turkish]
İpek Duben'de Merak, Dış Dünya ve Benlik
Seçil Epik
İpek Duben'in 40 yıla yayılan işleri malzeme, ortam ve ele aldığı konular bağlamında ne kadar çeşitlenirse çeşitlensin tüm işlerinin fitilini ateşleyen, kendine ve ötekine duyduğu meraktır. Bu merak sanatçıyı özellikle etrafını çevreleyen değişimlere eleştirel bir gözle bakmaya iten türdendir.
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[In Turkish]
“Kuyruklu Türk” – İpek Duben’in Eserlerinde Dil Kullanımı
Hatice Utkan Özden
İpek Duben’in Salt Beyoğlu’nda “TEN, BEDEN, BEN” başlığıyla gerçekleşen ve 8 Mayıs’a dek sürecek sergisinde dilsel ifadeleri anlambilim ve göstergebilim açısından yorumlamak mümkün.
