Mehtap Baydu
Cuma

Politics, religion, gender roles and experiences of boundaries are themes in Mehtap Baydu’s artistic work that are inevitably linked to life in different cultures. The tapestry Cuma, produced in an edition of seven, shows people praying in the historic Haci Bayram Mosque in Ankara during Friday prayers, which are reserved exclusively for men. Women are excluded from the most important prayer of the Islamic week.
Baydu chose the traditional craft of carpet knotting to depict the scene on a large scale. As in many of her works, she raises questions about the exclusion of women, cultural codes and gender roles. Her leitmotif is the body – her own, but also that of others. “As an artist, I was particularly interested in the relationship between body and body when I saw the men kneeling in prayer. In their physical proximity and their synchronized undulating movement, they almost have something of dominoes about them.”¹
For her, the motif had the potential to be transformed into a pattern for a carpet. The (abstract) prayer rug on which the men kneel becomes the image carrier of a photorealistic representation. Appropriated by the female gaze, she humorously places the depiction of exposed male buttocks in a domestic “decorative” context. The carpet was machine-knotted using the silk technique in an Iranian manufactory.
Text: Eva Scharrer

¹ Conversation with the artist on July 23, 2022.