Zehra DoÄŸan earmarks entire Carol Rama Prize for art house to be built in Turkey

Zehra DoÄŸan (Diyarbakir, 1989) is the winner of the first edition of the Carol Rama Prize supported by the Fondazione Sardi per l’Arte, a partner of Artissima since 2014: the artist has chosen to allocate the entire sum of the prize to the creation of an art workshop in the Turkish city of Mardin, the place where her family originated from.

An art workshop, aimed at people of all ages, which is inspired by a previous experience of the artist, namely an"art house“ she founded with some friends in the historic ”Sur" neighborhood of Diyarbakir and later destroyed during clashes in the territory between 2015 and 2016. It was a house was open to painters, sculptors, filmmakers, the residents of the neighborhood and the city, a step toward popularizing art and purifying it from an elitist view. In the course of attacks on the Kurdish population, the “Sur” neighborhood, an architectural jewel, was largely destroyed by the army and was rebuilt with concrete buildings that eliminated its history and characteristic architecture.

The Carol Rama Prize is awarded to the artist whose research best interprets the ideal of unconventional female creativity and artistic freedom that Carol Rama’s works and personality embodied and conveyed with extraordinary force. In addition to a cash award, the prize offers the winning artist the opportunity to activate a project dialogue with the Sardinian Art Foundation and the Carol Rama Archive during 2021. Zehra DoÄŸan expressed her gratitude toward the Sardinian Foundation for Art: being the first winner of the prize allowed her to take the first step in recreating the Diyarbakir Art Workshop in Mardin.

The prize was awarded to her by an international jury composed of Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Institute of Art History of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, Bart van der Heide, director of the Museion Museo D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bolzano, and Kathryn Weir, director of the Museo Madre - Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples, with the following motivation: “The jury unanimously awards the first edition of the Carol Rama Prize by Fondazione Sardi per l’Arte to Zehra DoÄŸan, for the extraordinary ability of her work to translate a highly contextualized experience, drawing on multiple aesthetic legacies. In relation to Carol Rama’s work and the Prize’s intention to convey her unconventional idea of creativity and artistic freedom, strongly influenced by her position as a woman of her generation in Italy, the jury found a resonance in DoÄŸan’s artistic approach and particularly in her strategic appropriation of materials found from her surroundings.”

Pictured, Zehra DoÄŸan Ph. Credit OKNOstudio

Zehra DoÄŸan earmarks entire Carol Rama Prize for art house to be built in Turkey

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