Haunting images of high heels mark 440 women killed by partners in Turkey last year
A new Istanbul art installation featuring high heels marks the hundreds of women killed by their partners in domestic violence cases in Turkey last year.
Turkish artist Vahit Tuna has hung 440 pairs of high heels on a building in Istanbul, the country’s capital city, to highlight the national problem of domestic violence.
The open-air art installation is exhibited as part of Yanköşe, a not-for-profit arts platform started in 2017 by Kahve Dünyası, a Turkish coffee chain.
“We wanted everyone passing by the road to see [the work]. This is why we did not want to host the exhibition in a closed area,” artist Tuna told Turkish media, as reported by the Hurriyet Daily News.
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“This is an installation project that consists of shoes. There are 440 pairs of shoes here. These 440 women shoes are equal to the number of women killed in 2018 in Turkey,” he added.
The space available to exhibit art consists of 260 squares metres on the outer wall of the coffee franchise’s Kahve Dünyası branch.
The number of domestic violence deaths in Turkey has increased, according to the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, an organisation which provides legal assistance in cases of femicide (women being murdered).
The 440 women killed by a partner in 2018 compares to 409 in 2017, according to the body’s figures.
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Domestic violence remains a huge issue in the UK, too, although not on the same scale as in Turkey.
The latest figures from the Office of National Statistics reveal there were 400 domestic homicides recorded by the police in England and Wales between April 2014 and March 2017. The majority of those killed (239, or 82%) were women.
