Oya - The Silent Language of Anatolian Women
2026
Installation
"The Wild Summer of Art 26"
Brutus Rotterdam
This new work was commissioned by CBK Rotterdam for presentation at Brutus, Rotterdam, in 2026, marking an important development in my ongoing research into Oya – The Silent Language of Anatolian Women and its translation from intimate textile practice into a spatial installation.
Oya – The Silent Language of Anatolian Women is a textile installation combining a 150 × 120 cm canvas drawing made with acrylic ink and original oya-embroidered scarves inherited from my mother and grandmother. The scarves are attached to the back of the canvas, extending beyond the image and into the surrounding space. Across the ceiling and along the raw architectural edges of Brutus, I installed enlarged oya-inspired forms made from cotton fabric dyed with a combination of natural and synthetic dyes. The textile structures follow the edges and movements of the scarves, surrounding the drawing and creating the feeling of entering an enlarged oya-embroidered textile.
This work is part of my ongoing research into oya, a traditional Anatolian needle-lace practice through which women have passed patterns, meanings, memories, and knowledge across generations. I am interested in oya as a visual language that allowed women to communicate feelings and experiences through motifs when these things could not always be spoken openly.
For example, the red pepper motif, or biber oya, could be worn by a young married woman who was unhappy in her new home or experiencing conflict with her husband or mother-in-law. The bitter and hot pepper became a way of saying that the relationship between them was “as bitter as red pepper.” In some traditions, the deeper the red, the more severe the conflict. These small motifs could therefore carry messages about anger, unhappiness, tension, and difficult experiences within a marriage without the woman having to say them aloud. By bringing this language into a large-scale spatial installation, I want to make these encoded stories present again and create space for the voices of women whose experiences have often remained unspoken.
By enlarging and transforming these intimate motifs into architectural forms, I explore how women's inherited knowledge can move from the domestic sphere into a shared public space. The drawing introduces a dreamlike world within this textile environment, connecting the personal history carried by the scarves from my family with a wider story of women, ancestry, and intergenerational knowledge.
