User Manual
June 2023 – June 2024
İSTANBUL
User Manual focuses on the dominance exerted by the patriarchy on women through objects. Inspired by Rebekka Endler’s Patriarchy of Things (İletişim Publishing House, translation: Çiğdem Canan Dikmen, 2022), the project directs its focus onto Turkey. While male-dominant society renders women’s labor invisible, patriarchal relations, which infiltrates almost every moment of our daily lives in numerous forms, haunts women’s needs. It is crucial to seek equal comfort while designing objects which will be continuously used by individuals. The plethora of situations which create particular disadvantages for women necessitates to highlight that objects are “ruthlessly” designed with a patriarchy mindset.
User Manual discusses objects’ policy over gender equality against the patriarchal movement which reduces women-centric production to one which is solely formal, decorative and ethicist. How much do urban planners care about women’s experience? Who holds the larger space in the public realm? Do the developing house technologies provide spare time for women? Who is responsible for the “uncomfortable” furniture at the offices we enter in the morning and leave in the evening? Concerning with the above questions and more, User Manual renders visible the disadvantages that women face in their role as the designer and producer of things, while materializing the negative interactions of the subjects which encounter and experience the objects. User Manual incorporates the use of podcasts and the social media into artistic creation, in addition to videos, with the goal of testing the findings of its research.
Özge Akdeniz
Özge Akdeniz graduated from the Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts Painting Department in 2019. She continues her graduate education in the Mimar Sinan University Faculty of Fine Arts Sociology Department, which she began in 2022. In her creation process, she pays attention to the interpretation process of the mind in order to analyze the subject she works on, and examines transformation possibilities of the forms of perception, identification and relation. Although she chooses her creation media based on the dialogue she establishes with the image, she uses painting as her predominant form. She participated in Belm’Art Space/ Ed.No.1 (2023), Gallery Kairos/ Returning Home (2023), Kasa Gallery / A Potential Empathy (2022), Energy Museum / Perceive (2022), BASE (2022 - 2019), TÜYAP Art Exhibition (2019 - 2018) and Mamut Art Project/Performance (2018). She currently lives and works in Istanbul.
Ayşegül Oğuz
Ayşegül Oğuz, journalist. She graduated from the Bilgi University Department of Stage and Performing Arts Management. She is currently a graduate student at the Mimar Sinan University Faculty of Fine Arts Sociology Department. Her career as a journalist began in 2002 and continued in the Roll, Bir+Bir and Express magazines, respectively, while also contributing to various publications including Aktüel, Radikal Cumartesi, etc. She was introduced to feminism by the works of the feminist collective that publishes Monday The Newspaper for Women, which holds a significant place in the memory of the feminist movement in Turkey. She currently works as a reporter for birartibir.org, which has been in operation since 2018. She continues to prepare for the podcast series titled User Manual.
This page is published on 7 December 2023.
