This lecture will focus on Mehri, the woman painter born in Istanbul in 1885 and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The talk will draw on a wide range of archival sources and contemporary materials, as well as close readings of a rich visual corpus, situating Mihri’s career—alongside that of her contemporary women peers—within debates on Orientalism, aesthetic hierarchies, and artistic agency in the late Ottoman Empire.
The talk will also explore the historical and social asymmetries between male and female painters, while foregrounding how women artists, as creative and active agents, navigated, confronted, and at times transformed the constraints and hierarchies that shaped their practice.
Gizen Tongo
Gizem Tongo is a research associate at the Khalili Research Centre, Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford, where she completed her doctoral studies. Her research focuses on 19th and 20th century art and cultural history, with particular emphasis on the late Ottoman Empire and the Greater War period (1914–1923). She has previously held postdoctoral positions at Oxford, British Institute at Ankara, and British International Research Institutes. Her work has been published in New Perspectives on Turkey, Archiv orientální, and CLIO: Femmes, Genre, Histoire, among others. She has co-curated two exhibitions and has taught at Oxford, Middle East Technical University, Hacettepe University, and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
