For Me, Being A Woman

A bold new gallery founded by two Turkish women in Southampton is redefining what contemporary art can mean for a coastal city — and for a diaspora that has always known how to make space for itself.

By TBMag Culture Desk

The first thing you notice is the painting. A figure in a dark suit and bowler hat — unmistakably Magritte in its deadpan surrealism — but where the face should be, a uterus. Brazen, anatomical, darkly witty. It is the work of Sarah Christie, and it serves as the visual anchor of For Me, Being A Woman, the debut group exhibition at Gallery Grounds in Southampton’s city centre. It is also, in a very precise way, a statement of intent.

Gallery Grounds opened in March 2025 at No.1 Vincent’s Walk — a sun-filled, accessible gallery that doubles as a cultural hub, complete with an in-house café called Coffelogy, which keeps the doors open to those who might never have thought to walk into a gallery at all. The founders are Aycan Erinsel Özistek, an interior architect, and Gülçin Pehlivan Tezdiker, an art historian. Both Turkish. Both women. Both now calling Southampton home.

“Gallery Grounds is more than a place to exhibit art — it is a living, breathing space where art intersects with everyday life.”

That biographical detail matters more than it might at first appear. In a city still processing its own complex relationship with migration, trade, and identity — a port city where ships have carried people and stories in both directions for centuries — two women from Turkey quietly building one of the most ambitious independent galleries in the South feels like its own kind of cultural intervention. They are not curating from the margins. They are building something central.

For Me, Being A Woman, which runs until 17 March 2026, brought together 44 artists in response to an open call curated by Gülçin Pehlivan Tezdiker. The brief was expansive by design: works exploring the body, memory, visibility, labour, resistance, and transformation — themes that move, as the curatorial statement puts it, beyond singular definitions of womanhood. What emerged is a show of striking range and emotional intelligence.

The artist list reads like a snapshot of contemporary women’s experience across cultures and generations: Abigail Kendrick, Alice McKee, Anastasia Neff, Angi Corrall, Anna Sokol, Anna Dora, Bedra Sahbaz, Charlotte Booth, Deborah Hillyar, Debra Sweeney, Debra Danu Matthews, Erin Kirtley, Esme Janson, Freydis Christopherson, Irina Ignatjeva, Joy McKay, Katerina Galai, Katie Munro, Lynn Young, Maddie Podstada, Megan Cheetham, Michele Waldron-Cooper, Nadiia Sadoviak, Nathalie Semlyen, Niki Bradfield, Paige Monroe, Rachel Jones (HMP), Rosemary Blake, Samar Zeeshan, Sara Truckel, Sarah Christie, Sarah May, Shiphra Smith, Silvia Ziranek, Sonja Norris, Stacey Gander, Sue Webber, Susan Hudson, Tina Peacock, Trina Hart, Tugba Hitit Imai, Urszula Filipowicz, Vanessa McGlone, Viktoriia Bezugla, and Zibeyda Seyidova.

One name in that list demands particular acknowledgment: Rachel Jones (HMP). Her participation signals something important about what kind of gallery Gallery Grounds intends to be. Art made within the prison system rarely reaches public exhibition, and the inclusion of Jones’s work is a quiet but meaningful act of solidarity — a reminder that visibility is not merely aesthetic. It is political.

“Forty-four artists. Forty-four perspectives on what it means, right now, to inhabit a woman’s body and a woman’s life.”

For readers of TBMag, there is a particular resonance to this story. The Turkish diaspora in Britain has long navigated the tension between cultural inheritance and reinvention — between the Istanbul they carry inside them and the British city that shapes their daily lives. Özistek and Tezdiker represent a generation of Turkish women who are not merely participating in British cultural life but actively shaping it. Gallery Grounds is their act of place-making, and it is one of the most compelling cultural projects to emerge from the South of England in recent years.

The gallery is open Monday and Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 4pm (closed Tuesdays), at No.1 Vincent’s Walk, Southampton SO14 1JY. For Me, Being A Woman runs until 17 March 2026.