Photography and video are inherently personal for me: I connect and converse with my family through them. This is a fundamental act because there are voices in my mind that are sometimes difficult to say out loud. With this image I want to speak about being a muslim woman, the memory and the limitation.
My name is Gulsen Goksel. I was born on the 19th May 1966 in Izmir, Turkey, of both are immigrants from Greek Islands. I grew up with my parents, and I listened a lot about the limitation of life against to expectations of becoming the new citizens of the Republic of Turkey. My mother couldn’t finish her primary education, and it was a negative impact on her expectations and aspirations which I understood from her stories. My father was a sergeant who went to the USA and some European countries due to the NATO project. While my father was an abroad assignment, my mother took care of her mother in law and my father’s brother. I watched, and I couldn’t argue against her limitation under her husband’s arrogance all my childhood.
In her childhood span in the 1940s, after contemporary Turkey’s founder Mustafa Kemal died, his plan of education, which was based on equal opportunities for both sexes, provided to be valid with Village Institutes. (1) Nevertheless, in the period of material deprivation, lack of the number of teachers, and financial obstacles, education was handled by religious activity in rural areas. The mosques fed rural backwardness on fatalism and religious bigotry. This situation destroyed Mustafa Kemal’s ideal for good and equal education. (2)
The only not education system and also Turkish Civil Law both shaped our personality. Foremost, adopting civil law from two modern western countries, could not put on real-life in Turkey (in 1926). (3) Naturally, the social structure of Turkish society was opposed to it. The misleading modifications brought limits to female people, and religious beliefs helped them granted in our life. Turkish women are busy standing her existence physically; they accepted this discrimination as legitimize.
Until last year, my religion was written on my ID cards; moreover my surname was spelt my husband’s one. It is from this feeling of limitation and also from a desire to prove that I’m as a person as I am a woman that I created this project. Islamic rules are tied me, because of I’m woman. “There is no Verse” as a name of the part of the series of “Memory Calls II”. I'm sharing all woman's fate in my country who beliefs and follows islamic rules imprudently. Is it because of their personal choice, which they made, whether it’s the obedience or the fidelity?
