Art and violence

The girl's wide eyes gaze out expectantly from beneath her blue-and-gold turban-style headdress, a single teardrop pearl glimmering in her ear. The photograph is a near-match for Johannes Vermeer's famous painting, "The Girl With a Pearl Earring," except for one thing; cuts and bruises mar the subject's eyes, cheeks and chin.

Turkish artist Derya Kilic's recent photography exhibition "To Know, To See . . . ," which closed in mid-January after a month at the Macka Sanat Galerisi in Istanbul, confronted viewers with a series of well-known figures -- women painted by the likes of Salvador Dali, Edvard Munch, Leonardo Da Vinci and Gustav Klimt, each bearing the marks of violence on their faces and bodies....

Read the rest of my article for Women's eNews about female artists in Turkey grappling with issues of gender-based violence in their work: "Turkish Artist Paints Cuts, Bruises on Old Masters"