What is “Honour?”
How could it be “honour”=woman” as it has always been told? What was that “ honour”? Is it sitting at her home, declaring off her efforts and body and demanding nothing for a woman? Or is it not looking out of windows, not wearing red jackets or not laughing loudly? Is it to be embraced tightly, to be protected, to be hidden or to be closed? Or is it obeying to always changeable “honour” coming out of a man’s mouth? We have asked “honour” both to the ones who bless it and to the ones who are startled by it. Thus, we have prepared an exhibition which consists of a film and photographs questioning “honour”.

The exhibition which has an objection to “honour”: Let’s talk about “honour!”

Our objection is, as we have noticed more as we went on asking, to the suffering and oppression it brought to us, to the restricted life presented us, the chance offered us tolive next door to violence or for some of us to live next door to ….

Thus, we have tried to look at “honour” from outside, from a feminist angle. It was already clear that looking at “honour” from inside was unrealistic because it was everywhere, so it was nowhere. It was everything, so it was nothing.

We have asked this “honour” bogy which has caused us to suffer a lot from the early times to the causers (men) and sufferers (women) in our interviews. Men were mostly “living for that” but fortunately, women frequently get irritated when they hear “the notion”, even though all women do not generally feel so. We recorded the film by asking “What is honour?” in the four cities of Turkey: Artvin, Diyarbakir, İstanbul and Van. We asked ourselves when we were taking the photographs: Where and how does this “honour” generate itself? The answers even suprised us at times.There came out our photographs from those questions and answers. It was really hard to take the photographs of this “honour” press that we are in as women. And we released the shutter to wear this press out…

The exhibition prepared with the contributions of European Cultural Foundation,Van Womens’ Association, The Governorship of Van, Diyarbakir Metropolitan Municipality,Yeni Melek, Arjans ve Rafineri.

The women photographers of the exhibition are Figen Ekti, Nilay Kepekci, Nilgun Yurdalan and Sine Boran Art.The film was prepared by Melek Ozman, Ulku Songul, Guliz Saglam and Birsen Atakan.This time we just do not want to see the foolish games in which women are killed for the sake of “nothing” or we just do not want to be oppressed for the sake of  “nothing”. We would like to share our film and photographs with you.

We wish that we can  leave behind all we had to live in the name of “honour”. And ,of course, the notion “honour “ in this way from now on….