| Abstrakt: |
As such, the woman in red effigy functions in the theatre to extend the political activism of the Gezi movement to wider audiences, affecting new "publics" outside Turkey, in this case a mixed German-Turkish audience. Vis-à-vis a public space defined as (mostly) masculine, as well as the predominantly male police corps that we can see behind the barricade of shields framing the action (Ming [23]), the single resisting woman in red stood out against other womenled protests during the Gezi revolt, such as the Kurdish mourning "Saturday Mothers", the "Peace Mothers" and other rallies in Gezi Park that called for justice and vigilance through maternal authority (Cetinkaya [10]). The similarity of contestation between I Mi Minör i 's pianist in red and Gezi's woman in red effigies against a politician's performance in an electoral system that is increasingly autocratic yet similarly based on a parliamentary representative democracy, apparently caught the attention of pro-government media. As such, I argue against simplistic renunciations of the intertwining of political and artistic activism, such as that suggested by Lieven de Cauter in his fourteen "Theses on art and activism" (2013), published at about the same time as the Gezi protests were in full swing. [Extracted from the article] |
