Gülsün Karamustafa: Portraying the Personal
By Anna Niederlander
Gülsün Karamustafa is a Turkish artist and activist, who was born in Ankara in 1946 and currently lives and works in Istanbul. Her artistic practice ranges widely and includes installation, video and painting and she uses personal and historical narratives to motivate and influence her work. Her works explore socio-political issues in modern Turkey. Solmaz Bunulday Hasgüler and Tuna Şare classify her work into three main categories; migration, identity, hybridism, memory, and boundaries; personal history and her own experiences as they relate to the themes in the first category; and works about gender roles and femininity.
The Apartment Building, 2012, Installation including thirteen color photographs on aluminum, foam board, wood, MDF, and acrylic sheet, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, https://www.documenta14.de/en/artists/22267/gulsun-karamustafa.
A lot of her works address issues of forced migration, such as The Apartment Building (2012). It is a small replication of the building she lived in since 1991. The actual building is located in one of the most popular areas in Istanbul and was built in 1931 by a Greek family named Vaslamtzis. The Vaslamtzis had to flee their home after the nationalist attacks against Greek, Armenian, and Jewish citizens in Turkey in 1955. Karamustafa after learning about the family and their story, met with the family multiple times and decided to make this work as a tribute to their history. She then delivered the work to the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, where it was exhibited alongside photographs that related to the building, such as photographs of the family or the violent events such as those of September 6, 1955. Many noted that this was a “symbolic act of return,” and emphasized the importance of remembering history and not burying it, especially since the attacks of 1955 are largely forgotten.
The Courier, 1991, https://archives.saltresearch.org/handle/123456789/190345?mode=full.
Further, her grandmother was one of the thousands of Ottoman Turks who in 1893, during the nationalistic upheavals in the Balkan, migrated from Bulgaria to Turkey. Her grandmother once told her, “As we were crossing the borders, we hid our important belonging in the inner pockets of the children’s (shirt) waists.” She decided to use a personal memory from her grandmother, to represent a cultural and disturbing experience. She wrote on small pieces of paper and attached them to children’s shirts, which were then mounted on clear Plexiglass stands. The installation resembled a mausoleum, and “transformed the artist’s personal memory into social consciousness.” Further, for an exhibition in Canada, she added two more t-shirts to the work, however she completely sewed them closed, making them unwearable, and represented the country that people had to flee and were unable to return to. Next to the installation was a photograph of her grandmother, which reminded the audience of the vulnerability that Karamustafa offers in her art as she reflects on personal memories.
Presentation of an Early Representation, 1998, installation, https://www.museum-ludwig.de/en/museum/collection/collection-of-contemporary-art.html.
Karamustafa also focuses attention on the systematic revision of the Orientalist stereotype in European art history. Her work Presentation of an Early Representation (1996) was created for the 1996 exhibition Exclusion/Inclusion in Graz, where the curator Peter Weibel purposefully adopted a multi-cultural perspective in order to stand against the exoticism that was greatly apparent in the Magiciens de la terre (1989) exhibition in Paris. The work consisted of an enlarged print copy of a representation by a German traveller to the Orient around 1580, who documented what he saw in a pattern book. The print depicts a Turkish merchant offering three women for sale, while the three men are sexually assaulting the women to inspect their sexual qualities. On the right side of the composition, a man leads a naked child figure into a slave trading room. Karamustafa found this picture in a book of the cultural history of Istanbul on Turkish daily life in the early modern period. Not only does the German traveller confirmed the prejudice that was widespread around the Orient, but “the illustrated cultural history by a Turkish author re-produces the tendentious image as a neutral document on the social history of Istanbul.” The title of the work indicates that “she is concerned less with the subject matter shown than with the depiction and representation itself.” She also changes the original handwritten commentary that was under the image, “How the captive Christians are sold and inspected,” to the critical title of the work. The work also includes an accompanying text, in which the artist responds to uncomfortable and difficult questions about her identity, and the presentation and representation as visual actions that structure the power and discourse around Orientalism. Part of the text reads, “Why do I still bear fears while I am presenting an early representation? Is it clear what I mean by “presentation” and “representation”? How should I define myself as a woman from Istanbul? What is my cultural reality in geography? What is the cultural reality of my family, which has survived through several migrations? What kind of connotations should I use to express that my creative sources are all heterogeneous? At which point should I start to define the contents of my cultural identity? How can I relate my culture to the history of other colonized cultures? Why do I have the feeling that I am always going to be questioned?” As Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff writes about this additive textual component, “The subjectivity of the text transmits the plight of an artist who has to provide information about her identity, although her artistic work focuses precisely on questioning herself and the violence that is inherent in every representation.”
Left: Fragmenting/Fragments, 1999, installation, https://archives.saltresearch.org/handle/123456789/190225.
Right: Double Action Series for Oriental Fantasies, 2000, https://universes.art/en/nafas/articles/2011/gulsun-karamustafa/img/09.
This theme is relevant in many of her other works such as Double Action Series for Oriental Fantasies (2000) and Fragmenting/ Fragments (1999). In Fragmenting/ Fragments Karamustafa uses detailed shots of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers (1834), Ingres’ Turkish Bath (1864), and Renoir’s Odalisque (1870) to question the fetishizing gaze on breasts, hands, feet, lips, ears, eyebrows, and jewellery on the bodies. This installation, “did not disavow the voyeuristic–fetishistic pleasure in the virtuoso painterly details, but reinforced it in the technical perfection of the reproduction—thus making it accessible for self-reflection.” She uses the methods of fragmentation, montage, and serialization to examine and overturns the repertoire of stereotypes depicted in 19th century nineteenth-century French Orientalist painting, and questions the viewers role in furthering these Orientalist notions and asks the viewer to be self-critical.
Left: Prison Painting 16, 1972, acrylic paint, graphite, crayon, and ink on paper, Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/karamustafa-prison-paintings-16-t15195.
Right: Prison Painting 10, 1972, acrylic paint, graphite, crayon, and ink on paper, Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/karamustafa-prison-paintings-10-t15190.
In her prison painting series, which consisted of 15 acrylic painting on paper, made between 1972 and 1978, she depicts women of all ages in prison settings. She was a member of the 1968 generation and politically active students during her time at university and spent six months in prison for her participation and organization of protests and government rebellion. The prison she was in for a while housed female prisoners serving life sentences. She started this series shortly after being released and as she stated, ‘I made them in order to remember, in order to be able to keep [what happened] in mind.” The series is seen as a critical reaction to the political repression in Turkey during the 1970s, however is also a way of documenting and comprehending her personal experience and trauma. It was not until 2013 that the Prison Painting series was exhibited, as for many years Karamustafa had refused to show these works, as she was not ready to reveal such a traumatic period in her life, and did not want to be seen as exploiting her experience and the friendships she made in prison. All the works are done in bright colours and a quasi-naïve style. They all depict intimate and daily moments of women in the prison. Karamustafa demonstrates how the inmates negotiated the different parts of their identity as mothers, friends, wives and prisoners. This series reveals “the daily struggles of the female prisoners are situated against a background of a patriarchal society, with women routinely suffering social exclusion and suppression.”
“In Istanbul, which is both a bridge and a geographic point of separation between East and West, the mix of religious, political, and cultural contrasts, contradictions and hybridity’s inform her work, and one could day that Istanbul is a hybrid which is central to Gülsün Karamustafa’s art.” Karamustafa does not limit herself to one medium or one theme, and over the years has created an expansive range of works, that though are isolated seem to all connect. As she stated, “I can say that each of my works is within another, it is as if one work is opening up and explaining another.” Karamustafa often emphasized her interest in the themes in her works, and her works find a way to be both poetic, as well as is marked by a documentary impulse. Karamustafa demonstrates how personal narrative is connected to wider movements, and through being vulnerable and open about private events, she has been able to connect to people globally, and is considered "one of Turkey’s most outspoken and celebrated artists."
Bibliography
Hasgüler, Solmaz Bunulday and Şare, Tuna. “Gülsün Karamustafa: A Vagabond, From Personal to Social, From Local to Global.” Woman’s Art Journal 35, no. 2 (2014): 11-18. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24395413.
Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Viktoria and Sánchez Cano, David. “Working on the Stereotype: Mona Hatoum and Gülsün Karamustafa.” Art in Translation 8, no. 4 (2016): 429-457. https://doi.org/10.1080/17561310.2016.1266810.
Tate. Gulsun Karamustafa. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gulsun-karamustafa-15930.
Tate. Gulsun Karamustafa: Prison Paintings 16, 1972. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/karamustafa-prison-paintings-16-t15195.