Curated by Müge Cengizkan and Ali Cengizkan and organized by the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in honor of the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Republic of Turkey, the exhibition “Women of the Republic Take the Stage!” meets the audience. The exhibition can be visited at Goethe-Institut Ankara between December 5, 2023 – February 4, 2024.
On the 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Republic of Turkey and Ankara as the capital of Turkey and the 90th anniversary of women’s right to vote and be elected in Turkey, the Embassy of the Federal Republic of Germany in Ankara is organizing an exhibition and panel discussion bringing three women from each country to the spotlight, who were prominent in the fields of science, art and politics in the early Republican period. The commonalities in both Republican Turkey and Weimar Germany are many and varied. One of the most important commonalities is women’s rights and the increasing representation and therefore visibility of women in society. The exhibition focuses on six women from both the young Turkish Republic and the German Weimar Republic who experienced both countries, languages and cultures in their education and working life, and between whom certain relationships and commonalities emerged. Archaeologist Halet Çambel, architect and restorer Mualla Eyüboğlu Anhegger, opera-theater artist and painter Semiha Berksoy, German pediatrician Erna Eckstein Schlossmann, computer specialist Marianne Laqueur and Austrian architect Margarete Schütte Lihotzky, who were forced to migrate with their families from Nazi Germany to Turkey after 1933.
On Tuesday, December 5, 2023, the opening day of the exhibition, a panel discussion with two experts from Turkey will take place before the opening. Prof. Dr. Feride Acar (METU) and Prof. Dr. Senem Timuroğlu (Özyeğin University) will speak on the current state of women’s rights in Turkey and the evolution of the struggle for women’s rights since the Ottoman Empire.
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