LOST EVE:
The Reflections of Modern World on The Image of First Woman
Paper Presentation for The Fifteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society, NUI, Galway, Ireland 24-26 June 2020
Throughout history, Genesis is one of the stories that artists produce most. It conveys personal and social myth; explains us the roles of men and women in a relationship and reflects the origin and quality of moral traditions. While this miraculous event is considered by some to constitute the beginning of human history, the story of Adam and Eve has been interpreted or even in some cases rejected by intellectuals. Although, the semiotic elements used led to many discussions about the description of the first woman in the early periods of Christianity, Renaissance and the secularization process in the West, freed artists for personal expressions through their social structures. This study’s aim is to reveal the communal and sociological place in the community of today's women through the descriptions of the Genesis story in the modern world.Throughout history, Genesis is one of the stories that artists produce most. It conveys personal and social myth; explains us the roles of men and women in a relationship and reflects the origin and quality of moral traditions. While this miraculous event is considered by some to constitute the beginning of human history, the story of Adam and Eve has been interpreted or even in some cases rejected by intellectuals. Although, the semiotic elements used led to many discussions about the description of the first woman in the early periods of Christianity, Renaissance and the secularization process in the West, freed artists for personal expressions through their social structures. This study’s aim is to reveal the communal and sociological place in the community of today's women through the descriptions of the Genesis story in the modern world.
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Graduates, 2017
The Village Institutes Graduate Portrait Series - Work in progress...
Village Institutes were an educational attempt realized in Turkey between 1937 and themid-1940s to transform Turkish countryside.
That being the case, there were a lot of expectations coming from all over the country related to this foundation. Some of them were about modernizing social relations, bringing end to poverty and ignorance, creating peasant intellectuals, to increase agricultural productivity, and to spread Kemalist Revolution in the countryside.
Village Institutes led one of the major debates in Turkish political life in those years, particularly in the 1950s and the early 1960s. Many right-wing politicians criticized the Village Institutes. When the new opposition party, the Democrat party (DP), came to power in 1950, they removed institute supporters from the ministry of education and abolished the twenty-one existing institutes by transforming them into ordinary teacher-training schools. Before their demise, the institutes had graduated 15,767 men and 1,395 women.
The Ideal City
The first urban contemporary project, Levent
The plan of the area Levent was held by the academicians and bureaucrats after the Second World War in 1950; known as the first urban contemporary project in the Republic of Turkey. Unfamiliar from the urban style of the city, the planners focused on a unique European way of living with houses of two story villas, private gardens and social lifestyle included cinema, shopping area, green parks etc.
It was built outside the city on a farm called Levant. In the 60s the houses also drew the attention of the film crews and was used as a film platform. Hundreds of classical Turkish movies took place in these houses.
With economical prices the houses attracted the middle class intellectuals and artists such as Reşat Nuri Güntekin, Aziz Nesin (who owned a bookstore), Yılmaz Güney, Fatma Girik, Memduh Ün, Göksel Arsoy, Türkan Şoray, Gönül Yazar, Güzide Kasacı, Haluk Tarcan, Melike Demirağ, jazz singer Rüçhan Çamay, Zeki Müren etc. with many historians and politicians.
Due to the political situation in 1970s and up until 12 September 1980 coup d’etat the locals got their share of the struggle too. Rauf Mutluay got a bomb threat. A journalist from the Cumhuriyet newspaper, Prof. Cavit Orhan Tütengil got killed in front of his house. Director Yılmaz Güney was exiled. Singer and actor Melike Demirağ and like her many more young locals left the country.
Today kebap houses, mall, banks, traffic and Business center’s crowd walking through the metro is what has been left behind.
List of 1000 neigbours of Levent from 1950-80
© İrem Ela Yıldızeli
