CONTEXT

In this MAC Tool, Derya Akay invites guests to their installation, a celebration of ancestral, queer, and matriarchal forms. Visitors will experience the preparation for the celebration, encountering artefacts and iconography associated with the artist’s own relations to their communities through the use of textiles, flowers, ceramics, cookies, preserves and other materials. The MAC Tool includes:

  • A recipe from the artist’s own grandmother
  • A treasure hunt
  • A colouring book, with sketches by the artist

The colouring book images will spark curiosity, subvert expectations, and challenge concepts of domesticity embedded in the art. The images may speak to intercultural exchange and awareness; they are playful, and meant to spark the conversations found in preparation of a celebration. The iconography found in these materials are coded with stories of differing communities and lineages, including Derya’s own familial ties.

FURTHER READING
  1. Akay, Derya, Nadia Belerique, and Corrie Jackson. “TBA x RBC Emerging Artists Virtual Event.” Toronto Biennial of Art and RBC Foundation’s Emerging Canadian Artist Program. youtu.be/BMIcozjegJk.

  2. Delany, Carol. The Seed and the Soil: Gender and Cosmology in Turkish Village Society. Oakland: University of California Press, 1991.

  3. Fukuoka, Masanobu. The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming. New York: NYRB Classics, 2009.

  4. Gaul, A., Pitts, G.A., & Valosik, V. (Eds.) Making Levantine Cuisine: Modern Foodways of the Eastern Mediterranean. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2021.

  5. Kemal, Yaşar. Memed, My Hawk. London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1961.
Image of works by Derya Akay
Suggested Age/Grade

K-12, Families, Intergenerational

Curriculum Links

The Arts, English, Social Studies, History, Geography, Canadian and World Studies, Social Sciences and Humanities

Keywords

Ancestor, domestic, dowry, tradition, Queer, matriarchal, iconography, familial, transmission of knowledge, geography, heirloom, history, Anatolian, dowry

Downloadable Content:
About the Contributors

Derya Akay (born in 1988, Istanbul, Turkey; lives in Vancouver, Canada) is an artist living on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh, and sə l ̓ ílwətaʔɬ / Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Selected recent exhibitions include Meydan, Polygon Gallery, North Vancouver (2021); Contact Traces, the CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2021); The Neighbour’s Plate, Unit 17, Vancouver (2020); The Lulennial II: A LowHanging Fruit, Lulu, Mexico City (2018); HERE, the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto (2017); with bread, Campbell River Art Gallery, Campbell River (2017); and Pumice, Del Vaz Projects, Los Angeles (2017).

Image Credit: Illustration from A Hand Full of Wheat Seeds.