Filiz Ankaç – Yok senden daha güzeli - Nobody‘s as beautiful as you 

By Heidi Trautmann

The common ground of beauty and violence: WOMAN

“The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man” Dostojevski

This is how Oya Silbery begins her comments on the new solo exhibition of Filiz Ankaç which was opened on 19 January 2018 and will last until 16 February. The message the artist has for us is just as hard on us women:

“My exhibition, the bullets that symbolize the male dominant world, is a criticism of the ‘nobody’s as beautiful as you’ manners of women whom by choosing to live in harmony with this world contributes to the global violence and degrading the status of women.”

It is what the queen in “Sleeping Beauty” says to herself in the mirror.

It is a warning, an impassioned appeal to all of us. Filiz Ankaç does not mean that women are the direct cause of war; she criticizes the negligence, egoism and egocentricity or even just the acceptance of a role men want to see us in. With cruel paintings of whores and war planes flying high to drop deadly bombs and with sculptured bombs representing the male organ, I suppose, she puts them on one and the same level.

The opposite image of WOMAN Filiz shows us with some portraits of role model women such as Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Marie Curie, Camille Claudel. 

Also her last exhibitions in the ArtRooms, in 2012, 2014 were about women and violence. It is a never ending theme and often overlooked when it does not concern us directly.

Her techniques of the present exhibition are interesting, rough, so the figures appear more like sculpted.  A very impressing exhibition.

The exhibition is still open until 16 February, viewing times according to the hours of the restaurant above.