Asli Çavusoglu

Mesopotamia Women’s Cooperative

In the exhibition Pink as a Cabbage / Green as an Onion / Blue as an Orange, Çavu?o?lu pursues her work on color to delve into an investigation into alternative agricultural systems and natural dyes made with fruits, vegetables, and plants cultivated by the farming initiatives she has been in touch with. Yet, rather than formulating the history of a particular color, the artist thinks through color, bringing together the various stories and models numerous farming initiatives in Turkey.

The fabrics – each corresponding to a unique initiative – evoke the question: How have the social uprisings in Turkey during the last decade shaped the way we reimagine sites of everyday resistance? Can planting seeds constitute a political act? Following the Gezi uprisings in 2013, the artist noted the formation of numerous urban guerilla gardens reclaiming neglected land and the establishment of ecological farming initiatives in rural Turkey advocating for sustainable and community-supported agriculture. Interested in the different models of resistance these initiatives proposed, her work takes the form of an installation of numerous fabrics whose different sizes, textures, patterns and rhythmic surfaces introduce a mapping exercise about their stories.

Mesopotamia Women’s Cooperative, 2020
For the textile associated with the initiative of Mesopotamia, the artist combines screen printed motifs of peppers — their specialty, alongside the shape of a uterus to represent the feminist model the collective adheres to (of women-only membership), which is unusual in the conservative environment of Urfa.