By Heidi Trautmann

 Women – Equal Rights for Women – Women in politics - Feminist art – Women and art around the world....Topics which take up a good part of our daily news and keep reminding that women want to take part in the course of things happening.

Within the framework of the International Women’s Day the second Women’s Art Workshop was held in Kyrenia Public Library again; please read what I wrote about the first event and how it came into life with the artist Ipek Denizli Karagöz organising it.

http://www.heiditrautmann.com/category.aspx?CID=7842221385#.VQJ3mNKUfg8

Ipek and her husband Ahmet are art teachers at the ‘Oğuz Veli Ortaokulu’ in Karaoğlanoğlu and that is where the International women artists were officially greeted by the Mayor of Girne Nidal Gűngördű and by the Cultural Director of the Ministry of Tourism, Education, Culture, Environment and Sports who are sponsoring the event......and they were vociferously greeted and applauded by the students who filled the auditorium. On a huge screen the art work of the guest artists as well as the local artists were shown and every artist came forward to introduce herself and talk about her art. Those were:

From Azerbaycan: Mahsati Ibrahimova; from Belgium: Carla Ferilli, from Bosnia: Meliha Teparic; from Slovenya: Agata Povlovec; from India: Poonam Chandrika Tyagi; from Turkey: Emine Tokmakkaya and Şefkat Işlegen; from Ukraine: Natalya Tarnay and from the TRNC: Bedia Kale, Nilgün Güney, Bahar Çıralı, Ipek Denizli Karagöoz and Zühre Özkaraman.

On Thursday, 12 March, the ‘Thursday Art Group’ the members of which regularly meet in Yeşiltepe for now nearly ten years for painting and life drawing sessions, went to meet the artists at the library, to get to know them and to discuss their philosophy of working and how it came that they followed the invitation to come to Northern Cyprus. Art must migrate in order to show the stories and colours of one’s country; artists are influenced by what is going on in society, politics and economy and so forth and from them you learn the most about another country. Art workshops around the world have become the fashion in the last years, art colonies have developed and thus artists meet and act as sort of auxiliary ambassadors for their country.  Thus North Cyprus has finally been recognised in the worldwide art circles and we find next to the names of artists the country of origin, i.e. North Cyprus, finally!  That was not the case some years ago. It helps lifting the curtain of isolation.

Yes, and it is from such art workshops that artists bring home the knowledge of other countries’ artists and so they get invited around. I know of artists in the TRNC who travel from one workshop to the next, they hardly work in their own studios anymore and if it were not for facebook I would hardly know where they are right now. The circles get wider and wider and artists are – in a metaphorical sense – holding hands,  exchanging news and building bonds.

The artists will be with us from March 09 until 15 with the final show of the work they have done on March 14, that is the opening evening at 18.30,  until March 20, also at the Public Library on the first floor. During the week they were given the opportunity to get to know the country; they were taken around with the support of Girne Belediye.

To communicate and to learn from each other, that is the best possible way of personal development and it helps to understand other citizens of the world.

 I will add some more pictures after the opening.