Sibel Kocabasi is a multidisciplinary visual artist, working in paint, staged photography and installations. Her work addresses many contemporary social issues, from the deteriorating natural environment to the results of the habitual lifestyle choices people make when they consume products unconsciously, as well as violence against women, and the effects of war and migration, across cultures and specifically in the Middle East. Her recent work includes the suppression of female identity and the later awakening of feminine power and confidence.
She says “I am interested in showing the struggle that women have with tradition. I want to emphasize how women perpetuate the traditional gender roles of their own culture. I became focused on the role of women in supporting the traditions which suppress them, the conflict between living with tradition, participating and keeping the tradition alive, and resisting against tradition which is harmful to us.
The symbolic use of cloth in my recent works focuses on themes of concealment or hiding, motivated by a reluctance to confront problems and making the identity of women visible in the light of their religious, linguistic, and racial differences. I wish to emphasize how purity and beauty are folded together with cruelty and loneliness, by mixing the immensely soft and silent, texture of fabric with synthetic gold and silver colored metallic survival blankets. "
Sibel Kocabasi earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Turkish Traditional Arts (rug-kilim design, natural dyes, conservation and restoration of textiles, and illumination of manuscripts) from the Marmara University of Fine Arts in Istanbul, Turkey. She received her Master’s Degree at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton Florida in painting in 2005.
Kocabasi is the recipient of the 2010 South Florida Cultural Consortium’s Visual and Media Artists Fellowship and the 2006 Hector Ubertalli Visual Arts Award.
Kocabasi will be one of five featured artists in CONCEPTuallism 2019 Installation Projects at the Box Gallery in West Palm Beach, opening Saturday, January 12, and will have a solo exhibition at Palm Beach State College’s Eissey Campus Art Gallery in Palm Beach Gardens, opening on Tuesday, February 12. Her work is in The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami, Florida, as well as in numerous private collections.
