OCAD University Open Research Repository

Saçımı Süpürge Ettim (Made My Hair Into a Broom)

Yarar, Damla (2026) Saçımı Süpürge Ettim (Made My Hair Into a Broom). Masters thesis, OCAD University.

Item Type: Thesis
Creators: Yarar, Damla
Abstract:

Saçımı Süpürge Ettim is a performance-based thesis that investigates domestic labour as an inherited emotional, cultural, and embodied structure. Rooted in my experience as a Turkish-Canadian immigrant woman, the project explores how everyday gestures such as sweeping, washing, and wiping can function as methods of artistic inquiry when relocated to a gallery environment. Drawing from performance art, feminist theory, sociological studies of domestic labour, and arts-based research methodologies, the thesis examines how care practices are transmitted through intergenerational memory and embodied repetition. The exhibition consists of three performances, Sweeping, Wiping, and Washing and Drying, which recontextualize domestic gestures within an installation environment constructed from personal and culturally significant materials, including crocheted doilies, coffee grounds, a washing basin, and inherited garments. Through these performances, the project investigates the unstable relationship between care, sacrifice, love, and obligation within domestic labour. Although the work initially aimed to examine inherited labour through feminist critique and cultural memory, the performance itself revealed a more personal dimension. The act of performing these gestures exposed my own internalized understanding of associating love with sacrifice. Through installation, performance, and reflection, the thesis demonstrates how performance can function as a form of research capable of producing embodied knowledge. Saçımı Süpürge Ettim proposes performance as a method for examining domestic labour not as a fixed symbol of oppression or devotion, but as a contradictory emotional structure shaped by culture, gender, memory, and personal experience.

Official URL: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18rMiZG-fnqqRFgTAf...
Date: 2026
Uncontrolled Keywords: Performance art; Domestic labour; Feminist art; Embodiment; Research-creation; Autoethnography; Intergenerational memory; Care; Cultural inheritance; Diaspora; Arts-based research; Turkish-Canadian identity
Divisions: Graduate Studies > Interdisciplinary Art, Media and Design
Date Deposited: 05 May 2026 17:08
Last Modified: 05 May 2026 17:58
URI: https://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/5055

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