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Gülsün Karamustafa
(b. 1946 in Ankara, Turkey. Lives and works in Istanbul and Berlin.)
Gülsün Karamustafa was born in 1946 in Ankara, Turkey. She lives and works in Istanbul and Berlin, where she is recognized as one of the most important and pioneering Turkish contemporary artists. She received her MFA from the Istanbul Academy of Fine Art in 1969. Using personal and historical narratives, Karamustafa explores socio-political issues in modern Turkey, addressing themes including sexuality-gender, exile-ethnicity, and displacement-migration. Her work reflects on the traumatic effects of nation building, as it responds to the processes of modernization, political turbulence, and civil rights in a period that includes the military coups of 1960, 1971, and 1980. Dduring the 1970s Karamustafa was imprisoned by the Turkish military dictatorship. She was refused a passport for sixteen years until the mid-80s and, unlike other Turkish artists, could not emigrate or travel. This enforced isolation led her to an analysis of her own situation and context: the city of Istanbul, interior migration and nomadism within Turkey, and the ideological and psychological ramifications of identity. Like a sociologist or anthropologist, Gülsün Karamustafa explores the historical and social connections of oriental cultures in her works, often using materials that express the hybrid character of different cultures and religions.
One of Turkey’s most outspoken and celebrated artists, Karamustafa has an extensive oeuvre distinguished by installations, paintings, sculptures, and videos that examine the complexities of gender, globalization, and migration. Ostensibly reverting to historical lore, Karamustafa’s artistic comments oscillate actually between sensual meta-narratives and ironic-critical stories about the present situation, addressing themes of identity and migration, cultural difference and acculturation within the contexts of orientalism and post-colonialism. Since the end of the late 1990s, she has often used found materials and images which she fragments, dismantles and reassembles in order to contrast private and public by referring to every-day life, culture, art history, and the media. Some of the topics she brings to light through her extensive body of work include: the cultural interstices brought by the newcomers from the Anatolian provinces to the metropolitan cities of Turkey, as expressed in their folkloric kitsch and the new musical genre of arabesque; the cosmopolitan cohabitation of communities and classes; the low-budget trade circulation which emerged around the Black Sea in Turkey; historical accounts and the deconstruction of historical Orientalism in European painting; the use of photographic images from the personal archive and the corresponding therapeutic effect of remembering. Karamustafa’s approach — poetic, but also marked by a documentary impulse — serves to address the marginalization of women and the violence witnessed by itinerant populations in the wake of Western economic and territorial expansion.
Gülsün Karamustafa is one of the laureates of the 2014 Prince Claus Awards that are presented to individuals or organisations whose cultural actions have a positive impact on the development of their societies. Karamustafa’s solo exhibitions include: “Chronographia” at Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2016-2017); “Swaddling the Baby”, Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna (2016) / Villa Romana, Florence (2015); “Mystic Transport” (a duo exhibition with Koen Thys), Centrale for Contemporary Art, and Argos Centre for Art and Media, Brussels (2015-2016); “An Ordinary Love”, Rampa, Istanbul (2014); “A Promised Exhibition”, SALT Ulus, Ankara (2014), SALT Beyoglu, SALT Galata, Istanbul (2013); “Mobile Stages”; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2008); “Bosphorus 1954”, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn (2008); “Memory of a Square / 2000-2005 Video Works by Gülsün Karamustafa”, Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel (2006); “Black and White Visions”, Prometeo Gallery, Milan (2006); “PUBLIC/ PRIVATE”, Dunkers Kulturhus, Helsingborg (2006); “Memory of a Square”, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich (2006); “Men Crying” presented by Museé d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris”, Galerie Immanence, Paris (2005); “Galata:Genoa (Scavere Finestrini)”, Alberto Peola Gallery, Torino (2004); “Mystic Transport, Trellis of My Mind”, Musée d’Art et Histoire Geneva, (1999), among others.
Gülsün Karamustafa took part in numerous group exhibitions including: “Citizens and States”, Tate Modern, London (2015); “Artists in Their Time”, Istanbul Modern (2015); the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial (2014); the 3rd and 10th Gwangju Biennials (2000, 2014); “Art Histories”, Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2014); “Artevida Politica”, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (2014); the 4th Thessaloniki Biennale (2013); the 1st Kiev Biennale (2012); Singapore Biennial (2011), the 3rd Guangzou Triennial (2008); the 11th Cairo Biennial (2008); “The 1980s: A Topology”, Museu Serralves, Porto (2006); “Soleil Noir, Depression und Gesellschaft”, Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg (2006); “The Grand Promenade”, National Museum of Contemporary Art – EMST, Athens (2006); “Why Pictures Now”, MUMOK Museum Moderner Kunst Stifung Ludwig, Vienna (2006); “Projekt Migration”, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2005); “Centre of Gravity”, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul (2005); “Contour the 2nd Video Art Biennale”, Mechelen (2005); “Ethnic Marketing”, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2004); the 1st Seville Biennial (2004); “In den Schluchten des Balkans, Kunsthalle Fridericianum”, Kassel (2003); “Blood & Honey”, Sammlung Essl, Vienna (2003); “When Latitudes Become Forms”, Walker Art Center, Minnesota (2003); the 8th Havana Biennial (2003); the 3rd Cetinje Biennial (2003); and the 2nd, 3rd and 4thInternational Istanbul Biennials (1987, 1992, 1995), among others.
Personal Time Quartet
2000, 4-channel Video Installation with sound, 2 min 39 sec
The video and sound installation Personal Time Quartet is designed as an ever-changing soundscape to accompany continually repeating images of a never-ending childhood. The sound was composed especially for this work by Slovak rock musician, Peter Mahadic. Comprised of various sound-samples (some of which are from rock concerts), each track was made to activate one of the four channels of moving image. The work is installed in such a way that each time the work is turned on anew, the four channels never synchronize, instead producing each time a new quartet to accompany the looping images.
When exhibited in an online context, Personal Time Quartet is shown in a single-channel format which nullifies the element of chance implicit in the perpetual reconfiguration of the four soundtracks of each separate channel. The quartet, no longer re-composing itself linked to the individual timeframe of each moving image, becomes static.
“The four-part video Personal Time Quartet is concerned with the point of intersection between the artist’s own personal biography and the history of her home country. Having been invited to an exhibition of German domestic interiors from various periods in the twentieth century at the Historical Museum in Hanover, Karamustafa was inspired by what she saw there to take a closer look at the similarities between her own childhood reminiscences and these museological German living spaces. The timeframe (or ‘personal time’) covered by these four video’s begins in the year of her father’s birth and ends in the early days of her own childhood. A video screen placed in each of the rooms shows the same young girl – the artist’s alter ego – engaged in various activities. We see her skipping with a skipping rope (dining room, 1906), sorting and folding laundry (kitchen, around 1913), opening cupboards and drawers (living room and parents’ bedroom, around 1930) and painting her nails (room from the 1950s).
The films themselves, however, were not shot inside the museum, but rather in her apartment in Istanbul. Viewing them therefore gives rise to the most diverse associations. The girl skipping suggests a carefree childhood, the nail-painting a concern with the artist’s own femininity, the folding of laundry could be read as preparation for her future role of housewife, while opening cupboards and drawers is a way of discovering the hidden secrets and stories that are so much a part of our recollections of childhood and adolescence. In this installation, therefore, Karamustafa not only debunks the local or national specificity of certain styles, but at the same time exposes just how similar the evolution of (female) identity can be, even in very disparate cultures.
Barbara Heinrich, from “Gülsün Karamustafa. My Roses My Reveries”,
Yapi Kredi Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık A.Ş, Istanbul, 2007.