Semiha Berksoy, 1910-2004

Semiha Berksoy was born in İstanbul in 1910. After being accepted by the İstanbul Municipal Conservatory in 1928, she studied sculpture and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in 1929. At the same time, she also attended the Theater School opened by Muhsin Ertuğrul. She later graduated from the Berlin Academy of Music and became the first Turkish opera performer to perform there. With her multifaceted personality and original approach to art, Semiha Berksoy was a prima donna who left her stamp on the history of art and culture in Turkey.

A true pioneer, Berksoy not only became Turkey’s first woman opera singer, she also created an unusual body of work over more than seventy years in the performing arts, literature, and visual arts. The shortest way to describe the multilayered and complex artistic practice of Berksoy who, in the words of author Ferit Edgü, “has no predecessor or successor,” would be “gesamtkunstwerk”. For Semiha Berksoy’s work, the term corresponds to a plane on which drama, performance, music, painting, poetry, costume, scenography, time, space, life, and everything else intermingle, are aestheticized through a holistic perspective, and virtually become “one”.

First dedicated to opera and the performing arts, Berksoy later focused on the visual arts. Expressing her imaginative power through figurative and theatrical forms in painting, she used canvas and later sheets as surfaces to work on. She made installations and even transformed her own bedroom into a work of art, saying “the whole world is in my room”. Berksoy painted self-portraits or included herself, her family, and her friends from the art world in her paintings. She interweaved the characters she portrayed on stage with her “self” and her life with art; she interweaved reality with dream in a poetic and tale-like style. She also used autobiographical elements and noted details, dates, places, works, and names of people related to her private or stage life. Thus, Berksoy’s works offer information, references, and codes for understanding not just her art but also the history of culture and the arts in Turkey. Berksoy’s painting entitled “Feast at the Prison” depicts Nazim Hikmet, Hikmet Kıvılcımlı and Kemal Tahir, who were imprisoned in Çankırı Penitentiary during the same period.