CİLVE BELLE NAZ BELLE

Bilsart is hosting the exhibition Eda Çekil’s “Eda Belle Naz Belle” titled, between the dates of 23 March – 8 April.

Lace and crochet have no flare

Work your flair, work your canter

Work your coy, work your banter

The name of the piece is a direct reference to a rhyme, chanted by Anatolian women regarding the trivialization of their laborious handicrafts in the household. Here, the sustainability of marriage and the order is not associated with the labor of the woman, but instead her sexuality. Sweet-talking, flair and coy attributed to a feminized women are emphasized as skills to be mastered. The laces used in this piece consisting of a video and installation are mostly made by the artist’s maternal grandmother for her dowery and passed down to her granddaughter much like the rhyme she herself chanted. More lace and crochet pieces are added by other women lacing for their own family doweries. The video shows the artist layering pieces of lace on top of each other until there is none left. The continuous labor of the grandmother over the years making laces is sustained by the granddaughter’s performance. The repetition renders the action invisible. A life’s labor of lacing is reduced to a heap within minutes. The laces connected by the artist spread throughout the space like a net in the installation accompanying the video.

ABOUT EDA ÇEKİL

Çekil’s works, mostly based on her personal history, combine photography and video with various materials on the axis of gender. The Family Album (2021), hir first solo exhibition in Istanbul, traces the stories of women via photographs that reproduce the myth of the sacred family as an instrument of power. Eda Çekil participated in group exhibitions including Don’t Look Back, Deep is the Past at Odunpazarı Modern Museum. Her works are included in personal and corporate collections including OMM and B3 House.

Continuing her academic studies as a faculty member, Eda Çekil completed her undergraduate studies in Faculty of Fine Arts, Department of Photography at Dokuz Eylül University, and her master’s degree in Media and Communication Studies at Galatasaray University. She received her Proficiency in Art degree with her thesis on the relationship between gender and photography in contemporary art.