KızBaşına Feminist
Art History

July 2022 - June 2023
ANKARA, İSTANBUL, ONLINE

KızBaşına Feminist Art History Project is aimed at everyone and young people who define themselves as women in Turkey wanting to produce and/or learn in the field of art. The project aspires to develop content to reveal the history of artist women in invisible and hidden archives and to develop innovative methods and contents in order to convey the history of feminist art to large segments of the society.

In the first phase of the project, a feminist art archive will be created as an open and accessible resource by identifying points that have not been examined in history about the existence and appearance of women artists in the field of art and their works that have existed in the nearly 200-year history of feminist art history, especially in Turkey and the Middle East.

In the second phase of the project, an art history board game will be designed as an educational tool, and the art history board game will be presented both as a learning tool and an innovative form of activism to provide practical learning of the knowledge compiled with the Feminist art archive. Considering that art classes are insufficient and access to art is limited, workshops to be held across Turkey are aimed at transferring knowledge about women artists and providing access to art at young ages, especially through art students and art teachers. In addition, the game will be digitized as it will be presented on online platform in order to expand its accessibility.

Finally, podcasts and videos will be developed to raise awareness about gender inequality in art and the status of women in art history, and it is aimed to draw attention to the subject with new media tools.

Kızbaşına

Kızbaşına is a social responsibility platform that aims to combat gender inequality-based violence and hate speech in Turkey. It's called KızBaşına, meaning On Your Own Girl by rejecting the hate speech as in "You can't do it alone as a girl" and creating its opposite as in "You'll do it on your own girl!" It was established in 2017 under the leadership of Yeşim Çaplı, METU lecturer. Today, with its 60 volunteers, 380,000 followers on social media and 5 million weekly reach, it carries out numerous campaigns and projects to combat gender inequality. With the Digital Carnation (Dijital Karanfil) project, as one of its main projects, KızBaşına has reached 16 million people with 1000 volunteers across Turkey and won Facebook's most effective international campaign award.

KızBaşına Art Gallery, the social initiative of KızBaşına, aims to support the feminist art movement in Turkey through a sustainable model and to offer opportunities for new generation artists to be involved in this movement. In order to achieve this, the gallery tries to develop financial support models that encourage women artists who have just started their careers, and to create mainstream awareness of feminist art in the society.

This page is published on 23 June 2022.