Ithaca College

Claudia Pederson, assistant professor of screen studies, was invited by the Goethe Institute (Germany) to conduct a presentation and present her collaborative project, Gün, with the Turkish American artist Arzu Ozkal, at the exhibition “ArtUP! Media Art in Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey “ in Athens, Greece.

Gün draws on the Turkish tradition of women’s social gatherings called “gün” (meaning “day” in English). A gün is a ladies’ gathering that involves conversation, activities and festivities accompanied by the serving of Turkish food. Gün(s) are informal hubs of social networks where women exchange recipes and skills, share opinions and remedies, and discuss issues and concerns about their local communities.

In 2011, during the 2011 International Symposium on Electronic Art in Istanbul, a number of Turkish women active in media convened together to facilitate a “gün” as the basis of a new kind of cultural-exchange (http://contrary.info/g.n/). The purpose of the project was to connect and highlight the work of women on the peripheries of the “North” working at the intersections of media and feminism.

In Athens, Pederson and Ozkal will conduct a two-day workshop around the theme of "home" with women new media artists from Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey. The work will be presented as an online publication and also as an exhibition at the Benaki Museum in Athens in conjunction with the exhibition ARTup. It opens on November 11. For more information, visit: http://www.goethe.de/ins/tr/lp/prj/art/art/prj/enindex.htm.