Semiha Berksoy, a renowned dramatic soprano, painter, sculptor, actor, costume designer, and performance artist, practiced “total art” across multiple disciplines throughout her long and prolific life at the forefront of male- dominated Turkish as well as German cultural scenes. Placed above her bed, Berksoy’s My Mother the Painter Fatma Saime (1965) was the key feature of her deeply biographical Semiha Berksoy Room (1994), an inhabited installation that, in her eighties, she created inside her apartment using her paintings of beloved acquaintances and their everyday objects. The portrait bust of the artist’s late mother, who died at twenty-seven from Spanish flu, floats in a pale pink realm where a white halo projects uneven but life-affirming rays of light. Fatma Saime’s unusually large eyes resemble those of Fayum funerary portraits. The artist paints her mother as a beautiful corpse – and also a saint. While there is the prerequisite bloodshed, it is counteracted by the presence of an enormous blooming flower, akin to the sacred heart. The flower symbolises her mother’s boundless love and artistic legacy transmitted to her daughter in defiance of death. The indomitable black line, which appears in most of Berksoy’s paintings, is not death’s signifier, but a marker of life and afterlife.
—Deniz Turker
