A cognitive linguistic metaphorical approach to Mona Hatoum's works

The divine role attributed to the artist in history both ignored the artist's efforts to produce knowledge and left the audience in a passive position against an art product. Throughout the history, changing art production styles and perception of art have placed themselves in interdisciplinary positions with contemporary art. The artists started to produce their products with higher intellectual dimensions complex conceptual and metaphorical contents. At this point both the art products and the artists create, in the context of their experiences and problems, has become an object of knowledge, and the audience has been able to experience the art product by getting rid of the passive position as in the past. In this study, the applicability of the Contemporary, in other words, Cognitive Theory of Metaphor, an approach used in analyzing literary works which we encounter in poetry and proverb critiques since in cognitive linguistic approaches, their contents are mostly rich in metaphorical language, to the analysis of art works in the field of visual arts has been examined. In this direction, domestic and foreign literature have been analyzed and studies related to the use of metaphors in cognitive sciences, cognitive linguistics, educational sciences and metaphors in art have been included. In the related studies, it has been observed that the Cognitive Theory of Metaphor is not widely used as a method of examining art products in our country, but it is frequently used in foreign literature. In the part of the study which includes conceptual explanations, concepts such as cognition/metacognition, cognitive linguistics, metaphor, image metaphor have been researched and examined using the literature scanning technique. According to these data, Contemporary Theory of Metaphor, which is one of the sub research areas of cognitive linguistics, has been used to examine the metaphorical expressions in the products of Mona Hatoum, who is considered as one of the important artists of today. In the third part of the research, the life of the artist, her works, interviews and critiques about her are examined. This study is a qualitative research. The main problem of the research is to examine the artworks of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's Contemporary/Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and to make it possible to analyze the metaphors which form the artwork. In the light of the data obtained from the research, making new suggestions about the process and methods of art education constitutes the subproblem of the research. In this context, the semi-structured interview method was used with randomly selected students from the Faculty of Education, Department of Fine Arts of Çukurova University to examine the ways of perception of products by means of cognitive linguistic metaphorical approach. Taking the comments of the participants into consideration, the metaphorical narratives in Hatoum's products were expounded in the context of Cognitive Theory of Metaphor. Findings were examined in terms of target and source areas of metaphor. As the theory suggests, as a result of the interviews, common metaphoric expansions have been obtained, as well as cultural, environmental and individual differences. When the interviews were examined in accordance with the subgoals of the research, it was observed that the participants had difficulty in doing concept-oriented readings and they tried to express themselves in a more concrete way. It is concluded that, actively participating in courses where different approaches to artworks are taken and works are analyzed, will improve art students' conceptual thinking skills and that providing information about the nature and formation of metaphors in these courses, will contribute to their creative and artistic thinking and enrich their artistic production abilities. Keywords: Cognitive Linguistics, Contemporary Theory of Metaphor, Contemporary Art, Mona Hatoum