Self-Representation of the New Woman across Kemalist Turkey and Soviet Russia: The Little-Known Photographs of Sabiha Bengütaş

When Sabiha Bengütaş (1904–1992) opened her solo exhibition in Moscow in 1938, her achievement as a woman artist from Turkey garnered praise in both Turkish and Soviet media. The enthusiastic reception of Bengütaş’s exhibition highlights the commonalities between the Kemalist and Soviet revolutionary narratives, which celebrated women’s newfound prominence in public life as a symbol of emancipation from Islam and capitalism, respectively. Despite the real gains women made socially, politically, and legally in both nations, their art worlds remained male-dominated, and women artists received fewer professional opportunities than their male colleagues. This paper focuses on Bengütaş's photographic self-portraits to reconstruct her vision of revolutionary subjecthood and the New Woman. In these photographs, she poses playfully and performatively alongside her sculptures of prominent men, including Turkey’s political leaders, for which she became famous. Although Bengütaş published some of these photographs alongside her coverage in Turkish print media throughout her career, these photographs have remained hidden in plain sight, and her sculpted portraits of Kemalist leaders have dominated the understanding of her work. Beyond capturing her desire to shape her own media representation, these photographs advance a model of revolutionary transformation through playful self-exploration, rejecting static identities that undergird tokenistic celebrations of women artists. Her performative gestures in these intermedial self-portraits, moreover, ruffle the representational authority of sculpture and photography alike. Bengütaş’s self-portraits offer an indispensable perspective on the role images played in the construction of revolutionary subjectivities during processes of secular modernization and nation-building in Eurasia.