The Back Room - Esma Yiğitoğlu

Esma Yiğitoğlu (Zincidere, 1944 – Rotterdam 2009) grew up in Turkey and left to study in Rotterdam at a very young age. She was the first Turkish student at the Willem De Kooning Academy. Yiğitoğlu’s oeuvre consists of sculptures, drawings and paintings.

The sculptures Yiğitoğlu made, starting from the early nineties, have stylized, organic shapes which she created using natural materials such as paper pulp, loam and terracotta. Although her work is primarily abstract, her sculptures often refer to archaic figures and architecture; they are related to Turkish amulets, Islamic graves and Egyptian sarcophaguses. With these works she explores the boundaries between the material world and an immaterial, spiritual world.

Cultural shifts
Yiğitoğlu actually found herself at the beginning of a development of which the consequences have only recently become obvious. The period in which she worked was a time of cultural shifts, both in the world of art and in the Netherlands in general. Due to globalization and migration, a multicultural society came into being. Meanwhile, ‘global art’ was created, in which universal themes and local traditions very often crossed each other’s path, and cultural positions started to mix with each other.

Turkish Cultural Centre
Yiğitoğlu played a crucial role for the emancipation of Turkish women in the Rijnmond area by founding a Turkish Cultural Centre for Women. She combated the illiteracy of Turkish women, so that it would be easier for them to function in Dutch society; pioneering work in the early eighties, a period in which Turkish migrant families lived under huge pressure in Rotterdam. For municipal institutions, she organized various exhibitions about the Turkish culture. On the one hand, the ‘foreign workers’, as they were called in those days, were given a face, and on the other hand the group was stimulated to obtain a place in Dutch society while retaining their own identity.

The Back Room
This year-long project investigated the position taken by both institutions – one as an established institute and the other as a contemporary exhibition space without a collection – on a local and national level. In this collaboration, TENT and the museum lay bare the subjective process of being admitted or not into the art canon. The artists who are presented during The Back Room have, for a part, been admitted into the museum collection, but did not always receive the attention that their works deserved. Thus, The Back Room also posed questions about the role and position of the artist: how do you build up a reputation and what factors have an influence on potential success?