In the first event of the 2023-2024 Spring Semester of the ITB technical trips, the students of the Department of Communication and Design and the Department of Culture and Arts Management, accompanied by Prof. Dr. Mehmet Üstünipek, Dean of the Faculty of Art and Design, visited the exhibition "A Forgotten Woman of the Republic: Melek Celal in All Her Aspects" exhibition at the Sakıp Sabancı Museum on Tuesday, March 19.

Following Prof. Dr. Mehmet Üstünipek's briefing on art studies and schools in the late Ottoman and early Republican periods, the students participating in the event had a conversation about the first female painters of the period. At the "Turkish Painting in the Footsteps of Modernism" exhibition, where the museum collection was also on display, students observed the process from the production of paintings reflecting the history of Westernization in the Ottoman Empire to the works of the Republican generation, which claimed to create an intellectual basis for art, and then visited the Melek Celâl exhibition.

The exhibition presents the works of Melek Celal, one of the pioneering female artists of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Republican period, who exhibited her first nude works at the Galatasaray Exhibitions in 1924 and held her first solo exhibition in 1935, as well as a rich archive of photographs, postcards, memoirs and letters shedding light on her life.