Z wielu – jedna. Powieści Elif Şafak, fotografie Dity Pepe

Abstract

This comparison of the novels by a Turkish author Elif Şafak and the pictures by Dita Pepe, a Czech photographer, is an attempt to show two different answers, given by women-artists, working on two different matters, to the question of searching for identity of a woman in the contemporary world. Dita Pepe, as an author of the series of her self-portraits with many other women and with men of different social status, builds her own artistic identity in contact with other people. Elif Şafak, in her novel “The Bastard of Istanbul,” describes the problems of understanding and saving personal identity in the melting-pot of the city, with the background of an old, but still existing conflict between the Turks and Armenians. In the novel titled “Black Milk” Şafak shows the internal complexity of a woman who tries to reconcile her maternity with being a writer. Both artists are similar in terms of unification of the subject and the object of their works, which are the artists themselves. They both refer to the contemporaneity, using “variety” as a definition of the identity of an artist.