Benal Dikmen’s Women of Troy

Benal Dikmen’s Women of Troy

Benal Dikmen’s Women of Troy is a site-specific exhibition reimagining her previous solo shows in Çanakkale in 2023. The first at the Troy Museum on March 8, 2023 and the second at the Manfred Osman Library in September 2023, the series in Çanakkale is both the beginning and the result of a long journey. Dikmen has been working as an artist and academic since the mid-2000s and is fond of both painting and writing. For her, image and writing have at times become interchangeable. Dikmen, whose fields of study include mythology, archaeology and history, and who teaches courses such as "Mythology and Contemporary Art" and "History of Civilization" at various universities, especially MSGSU, began to research the places where the narratives that interested her took place. For this purpose, after the pandemic, he spent time in Çanakkale, a city he had long been curious about, and conducted fieldwork. Dikmen teaches courses such as “Mythology and Contemporary Art” and “History of Civilization” at MSGSU as well as various other universities and she researches specific locations where the narratives that interest her take place. For this purpose, after the pandemic, she sets off for Çanakkale, a place she has long been curious about.

Much has been said and written on the Trojan War, which has been the subject of visual arts many times. During our first conversation over the phone with Benal Dikmen, talking about her project, I remember the question popping into my mind if it is actually possible to say something new about Troy in a city overflowing with Trojan legends and to create an original visualization of Troy. During our face-to-face meeting, though, having looked at the artist’s works that she had been working on for two years, this question posed by my skeptical mind disappeared and was instead replaced by an infectious excitement.

In his tragedy The Trojan Women, Euripides (480-406 BC) depicts the fate of Trojan women who are left behind after their cities are sacked, husbands killed, and the surviving members of families taken away as slaves during and after the war. In other words, the Trojan war is told from the perspective of women. Drawing on both primary narratives and critical readings thereof enriched with feminist perspectives, Benal Dikmen takes a contemporary look at the situation of women in wars of all times: “It can be claimed that women’s work and warriors’ struggle are necessarily opposed to each other. The former is creative, meant to turn disorder into order while spinning wool into yarn. At the same time, the women who sustain life, feed and care for children, are engaged in textile production and child-rearing, performing the work necessary for the well-being and survival of their community. The warriors’ work in Troy, by contrast, is destructive. The death of the warriors in battle removes the care that women took to give birth to these men and to raise them from infancy,” she explains, bringing Trojan women into contemporary art.

Helen’s Double Life: What can we learn from Helen, reputedly the first woman to wear pants,¹ about “living a feminist life”?

Helen of Troy is one of the most complex and mysterious characters in Greek mythology. For nearly two millennia, her story has been retold, reformatted and reinterpreted in different contexts for different audiences. Her character has been interpreted in contradictory ways by thinkers, poets, playwrights, novelists, musicians, directors and artists, and changed accordingly. Helen has become one of the most controversial figures of Greek mythology.

In the general narrative, Helen is known in popular culture as the woman who started the Trojan War, the woman to blame for everything,² but in fact there is some ambiguity regarding Helen’s “position” in the Trojan War. According to the narration of Greek poet Stesichorus (630-555 BC), Helen never set foot on Troy. In his poem, he writes that Helen was actually taken to Egypt and the woman Paris is said to have smuggled to Troy was only an illusion, “an image mistaken for reality”. Euripides also bases his drama, Helen, on the fact that she never set foot on Troy, but did live in Egypt.³

Against the backdrop of third wave feminism, Helen has been reinterpreted by feminist writers and thinkers within the frames of beauty, responsibility and guilt. In her poem “Helen in Egypt”, written in the 1950s and first published in 1961, Hilda Doolittle explores Helen’s existence from a feminist perspective. She reworks the ancient story of Helen in a way that contrasts with the male-dominated stories of the western world and chooses Egypt as the setting of the poem in order to attribute the character a new female identity, experience and discourse, a new view of womanhood and a new quest for self-discovery. Doolittle’s Helen does not come across as a passive character whose story is told by others; she is rather an agent who can speak for herself.⁴

According to Benal Dikmen, Helen, as the paradigm of absolute beauty, constantly evades anyone who ventures to depict her, thus denies anyone from doing so. Within these limits, Helen becomes an object of the male gaze, which leaves her open to slander and accusation as well as sexualization and fetishization. Thus, in the world of the visual arts as in the world of literature, Helen emerges as both the essence of feminine beauty and a powerful symbol of the destruction that irresistible beauty can wield.

The two different Helens in Egypt and Troy, who both conflicted and reconciled with each other, have transformed into a duality that constitutes Dikmen’s work. Does this divergence emerge from Helen’s contradictions in the face of Paris’ love? Dikmen states that whereas one part of Helen wants to go with Paris, the other part prevents her from doing so, and that this divergence is the duality that separates war from love, and the external and power-driven from the internal and psychological: “The masculinity and war narrated by the Greek tradition is marginalized; in its place there appears a story of womanhood and love found in the older, less knowable civilization of Egypt.”

The initial divergence between these two Helens gives us a space where the figure of Helen can be depicted outside the boundaries of the epic tradition. The artist, who understands that Helen is humiliated and misunderstood in the Greek tradition, describes her as follows: “When she is considered a victim of fate, she is seen as the silent pawn of masculine ambition and desire and, paradoxically, interpreted as sexually deviant and destructive. For the Egyptian Helen, however, there is no such accusation or questioning. The Egyptian Helen proposes a formulation of woman and her freedom, a representation of femininity that transcends the opposition between unity and division.”

In Helen’s Double Life, Benal Dikmen interprets Helen not as a source of inspiration or a point of departure, but as a character to be rewritten and rethought. She repositions the female figure at the center of the epic. The artist does not prefer to put forward a fictive and didactic narrative. On the contrary, she leaves Helen open-ended, contradictory and undecided. “As a matter of fact, Helen seems to evade us as we try to understand her,” she says.

As with both exhibitions in Çanakkale, collages remain at the heart of this exhibition. The artist created the works that make up the exhibition by clipping anonymous 19th century photographs. While studying textile design at the State School of Applied Fine Arts, the artist made frequent use of collage, and after graduating from the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University Department of Painting, she occasionally made collages and participated in various group exhibitions with such works. Dikmen thinks that the surface of the canvas is sometimes insufficient to reflect all thoughts, and that the collage technique gives her more opportunity and convenience in expressing her thoughts and solves the problem of space more easily. Moreover, she believes that when making a collage, the unconscious —the uncanny— emerges from the unconscious, deepening the work.

Consciously resorting to anachronism in all of her works in this show, Dikmen sometimes borrows clothes, objects and mythological figures from ancient Greek vases, but she has created eclectic and hybrid figures by adding elements that are not found in that period and region. Dikmen, who creates figures by clipping pieces from figures of various periods, prefers to show the figures with a blurred face, remaining faithful to the “unpresentable” Hellenic figure. Through her conscious use of anachronism, she has expanded Helen’s identity to include women from various periods and cultures who have commonly experienced the problems of patriarchy.

The artist collaborates with the artist duo Ahmet Rüstem Ekici and Hakan Sorar to transform the collages into videos. The collages, consisting of anonymous female figures and various objects containing symbolism, have been printed on large fabrics upon coming together on a horizontal plane in the digital environment. The choice of fabric coincides with Dikmen’s involvement with the Carpet Workshop at Mimar Sinan, where she is a regular, and with the fact that she is a textile graduate. In addition to the video and framed collages, we have installed the six works in the space with a light panel.

Benal Dikmen believes that mythological narratives demand to be conveyed to our age and should be reinterpreted according to today’s ideas, new art fields and techniques. She continues to act as a kind of “mediator” between mythology and contemporary art with this exhibition. While bringing mythological narratives back to the agenda in Women of Troy, she invites the viewer to examine the time we live in from a gender perspective.

Nergis Abıyeva, March 2024, Erenköy.

Translation: Zeynep Nur Ayanoğlu.

¹I learned that Helen was known to be the first woman to wear pants during a visit to the library in March 2023 when we had a conversation with archaeologist and librarian Gül Yurun Mavinil.

²Is it a coincidence that the Adam and Eve story in the holy books adopts the same approach?

³Karen Bassi, Helen and the Discourse of Denial in Stesichorus' Palinode, Winter 1993, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Winter 1993), pp. 51-75.

⁴Nisa H. Güzel Köşker, “Revision of Helen’s Myth and a New Female Discourse in Hilda Doolittle’s Helen in Egypt”, Dil Dergisi, Ocak-Haziran 2016