Who is Meltem Uldes? (1976-Kütahya)Was born in 1976. She is an art historian and an artist. After graduating from Marmara University Faculty of Communication, she completed her master’s and doctoral degrees at Istanbul University Department of Art History. In her doctoral thesis titled “The Representation of the Individual in Turkish Painting (1850-1950s)‘, she examined identity formation in the late Ottoman and early Republican periods in the context of socio-cultural, political and intellectual conditions; the existence of the ’individual”; the phenomenon of the individual in Turkish painting; and the position of the artist as an individual within society. She researched the signs that reveal the individual in selected self-portraits and portraits, such as the model’s personality traits, state of mind, and social position. She examined the reflection of the female image as an individual in painting through various identities and based her artistic production on this theme.Between 2000 and 2022, she held 8 solo painting exhibitions in Turkey, Norway, Spain, and Montenegro, and realised a photography project titled ‘Time Against Human’. In 2023, her works were exhibited at the special presentation of Projectleyla at ‘Maison Boel’ in Brussels.Since 1998, Meltem has participated in numerous group exhibitions, art fairs and art festivals in the United Kingdom, Lebanon, Greece, Pakistan, Montenegro and Turkey. In 2019, she took part in the Biennale Arcipelago Mediterraneo entitled ‘Übermauer’ held in Palermo to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which focused on the theme of borders. Her paintings have been used on book, magazine and album covers.While living in Turkey, she taught art history and art theory as an academic at Haliç University. She wrote articles for art magazines and newspapers. She participated in seminars as a speaker. Most recently, she wrote a section on Melek Celal Sofu in the book ‘40 Women, 40 Lives in Women's Special Archives,’ published by the Women's Works Library in collaboration with İBB Kültür A.Ş.She has been living in Palermo, Italy, since 2017, where she continues her artistic and academic work.She is a member of the International Plastic Arts Association a+A UPSD.Uldes is currently working on a book-documentary project about Sicilian traditions. She continues to give seminars on art history at UMAG (Uğur Mumcu Investigative Journalism Foundation).About Her Art:
In the words of İsmail Gezgin:In Meltem Uldes’s drawings, the masks on the face fall down first, and then the truth reveals itself. The deep and melancholic eyes are not symmetrical anymore; they don’t look at what the cultural power tells them to do, and there is a deviation in the look. What they look at and see are zoe’s (ζωή) objects of desires rather than being bios’s (βίος), and there, not aesthetics but satisfaction of desires is looked for. The nose is not a mainmast anymore; bony and robust, it tends towards the animal and seeks the smells repressed by the power. The mouth and lips aren’t oriented towards the external world and are far from smiling for social sympathy. The edges of the lips are downwards, expressing the unhappiness of the truth, contrary to the happy appearance of the mask that was worn over.(…) Meltem Uldes finds her way of standing up against the sexist attitude of capitalism –which turns individuals with unsatisfied desires into consumers with dreams of happiness– in exiting the images on bodies. Bodiless heads, legs and arms, cold and finite, are like messengers of another existence. A leg, implied by its absence as it pushes the body out of the culture in one painting, turns into a solo character in another painting.Uldes starts an excavation on bodies in a Foucaultian archaeologist’s manner. In her paintings, all layers of culture in the bodies vanish with the networks of power that form them. The form dissolves, the whole disintegrates, and dullness becomes fluidity. The head separates from the trunk. The body in the prison of the mind excludes the template-like image of the Platonic world and becomes free, and as it loses the organs, the organ becomes bodiless.
View all posts
