“Zintuhi-“, says the exhibitions, is is the name of female/male dancers and singers in the ancient Asia Minor and Hittite world charged with carrying and presenting idol figurines during holidays and celebrations.
From the catalogue notes: ‘Ceylan Öztrük started her research onintoVenus statuettes and the historical fiction represent with intervention performances at the Vienna Natural History Museum in 2014. Öztrük puts the knowledge of motherhood and fertility cast on Prehistoric Venus bodies aside and accepts them as symbols of beauty and confidence. She questions men’s discourses on the female body by reproducing Venus figures as objects of pleasure. The Venus of Willendorf on display in Vienna is followed by an eleven thousand-year-old Monruz figure that was unearthed during an excavation in Switzerland in the early 1990s. The artist reshapes these Venus sculptures with glass and ceramics, referring to their original materials. With the series “Call Me Venus”… Venuses created between 25.000-5.000 BC are the sources of Öztrük’s art. Thanks to these sculptures, which the artist has reinterpreted and turned into objects of pleasure, the female body is separated from male domination. Now the woman can be satisfied with the very image of herself. Thus, the image of women is returned to the privacy of women…’
Issue 66, December 2023
Turkey’s Centenary Issue
