Berlin: Gülsün Karamustafa

Gülsün Karamustafa: Chronographia

Hamburger Bahnhof

BERLIN

With the current instability of West Asian politics giving cause for alarm, it was invigorating to be confronted by the work of an artist who, over the past four decades, has reflected deeply on, and acted within, such sociopolitical currents. “Chronographia,” Istanbul-based Gülsün Karamustafa’s retrospective held at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, made a virtuosic, and at times breathtaking, impact.

Marking the first comprehensive showing of her work outside Turkey, the exhibition comprised around 110 works—ranging from her prison paintings of the 1970s, to her fabric and photo installations of the 1980s and 1990s, as well as her films, videos and installations since 2000. With the show split into three different areas of the museum, a thematic layout was adopted, which, as exhibition curator Melanie Roumiguière points out in her catalog essay, also acted to “decenter” any Eurocentric compulsion.

This approach brought obvious benefits, but also confusions, as it enabled the telescoping of time and place under particular headings. Among the display was a four-channel video installation entitled Personal Time Quartet (1999), in which a young girl reenacts Karamustafa’s memories in different scenes; these images and their soundtrack are unsynchronized and interact randomly, much in the way that memory itself operates. A similar channeling between individual and collective was seen in the two-screen video The Settler (2003). Here, a montage of family photographs and images of Balkan War history (1912–13) abridges the time from the end of the Ottoman Empire—when Karamustafa’s mother and grandmother were forced to migrate from what is now Bulgaria to Istanbul—to the present day.

Together, personal and political events weaved a temporal maze, which Karamustafa elaborated on by inserting images, objects and testimonies that illuminated their broader social impact. Among her earliest works shown were brightly colored paintings made during a trying time in prison, when she and her husband were arrested for their political activism following the 1971 Turkish military coup. A large, black-and-white photograph of the couple in court served as the centerpiece for an installation entitled Stage, which was not made until 1998. As if traversing this gap in time, associative words projected onto the image—namely, “stage,” “regime,” “control” and “ideology”—moved together, then ricocheted off each other, as though caught in a searchlight.

Although Turkey’s military dictatorship returned in a subsequent coup in 1980, it liberalized the economy and competed with the growing presence of fundamentalist Islam. With the passing of time, Karamustafa also moved away from the empathetic leftism of her earlier work toward more complex responses that revealed the ambivalence of Turkish Republicanism and how it has, stylistically and in substance, wavered between kitsch, cosmopolitanism and fascism. Her garishly colored textile works (beginning from the 1980s) sardonically debunked exoticism, but also incorporated Christian motifs through a range of aesthetic forms typically associated with Islam. Issues of gender were also a key element, which in the exhibition was addressed both directly, in the three-channel video Men Crying (2001), and obliquely, with Double Reality (1987/2013), a one-armed male mannequin in a pink dress enclosed within two intercrossing cubic frames. The latter referenced the topical but politically ambivalent issue of transgender identity, explored more extensively in Kültür: A Gender Project from Istanbul (1996), a video installation showing the sensationalistic portrayal of transgender figures on Turkish television.

The waves of migrants that flocked to Istanbul after the implosion of the USSR also became a major theme in her work. Among them was the video Unawarded Performances (2005), which gives voice to Moldovan women illegally working as caregivers (Karamustafa also made works about Russian women who resort to prostitution and smuggling), while another film, Stairway (2001), showed the pathos of Roma children busking on the streets. The most poignant of these was New Orientation (1995–2016), which involved a narrow footbridge joining the museum’s east and west wings, almost blocked by hundreds of pink and white ribbons, each bearing the name of a missing woman who came to Istanbul, in vain, to find love and fortune.

This exhibition presented a kaleidoscope of all aspects of Karamustafa’s work. Yet, ultimately, this came at a price, as it created confusion about her chronological development as an artist.

DAVID ELLIOTT