Feminist art in the Middle East and Turkey | 4 March 2021

CBRL Sound

This webinar, co-hosted by the Council for British Research in the Levant (CBRL) and the British Institute at Ankara, will showcase the latest debates and scholarship on modern and contemporary feminist art practices and histories from the Middle East and Turkey. The panellists will share their perspectives on feminist art in Syria, Turkey and Palestine. Dr Charlotte Bank will discuss feminist approaches in works by Syrian women artists and how they have been a vehicle for social change; Dr Ceren Özpınar will examine how the history of feminist art in Turkey has been commonly told and why that should be challenged; and Dr Tina Sherwell will highlight the work of Palestinian women artists. The webinar will be chaired by Dr Toufic Haddad, Director of CBRL’s Kenyon Institute in Jerusalem. About the speakers: Dr Charlotte Bank is an art historian and curator with a PhD in Arabic from the University of Geneva. She has held academic positions and fellowships at the Universities of Bamberg and Geneva, the Orient Institute Beirut and the Museum of Islamic Art Berlin. As a curator, she has worked with art institutions in Europe and the Middle East. Dr Ceren Özpınar is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Brighton, History of Art and Design Programme. Previously. she was a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the University of Sussex (2015-17) and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds (2013-14). Dr Özpınar holds a PhD in History of Art from Istanbul Technical University (2015). Her research focuses on contemporary art, art historiography, and feminist art and art histories since 1960 with a special interest in Turkey and the Middle East. She co-edited Under the Skin: Feminist Art and Art Histories from the Middle East and North Africa Today (OUP, 2020), and published her first monograph The Art Historiography in Turkey (1970-2010) (Tarih Vakfi, 2016). She is currently working on her next monograph Politics of Writing Art Histories: Narratives of Contemporary Art, Feminism and Women Artists from Turkey (forthcoming, OUP). Dr Tina Sherwell is the Head of the Contemporary Visual Art Programme at the Faculty of Art, Music and Design, Birzeit University. Dr Sherwell was Director of the International Academy of Art, Palestine (2007-2012 and 2013-2017). Previously, she was Programme Leader of Fine Art at Winchester School of Art (2005-2007). She was also Executive Director of the Virtual Gallery at Birzeit University and has worked with the Tate Online on their digital archives (2004-2006). Dr Sherwell’s recent curated exhibitions include Intimate Terrains; Representations of a Disappearing Landscape, the Palestinian Museum (2019).