Laureate Talk for the 2014 Prince Claus Award,
I first came across Gülsün Karamustafa’s work in 1986 in one of the “A Cross section of the Turkish Avant-Garde” exhibitions. I remember the unease of not knowing what to make of her wall work, ‘ Shield, ‘ which looked like a cocoon and was layered with textiles and tulle, in an unmissable tension with the cultural center’s solemn galleries. It was from the heart, frail, and out of place with its evocations of the exuberant colors of the quilts and wall carpets thinly veiling the hardship of settlers living in the city. Istanbul’s color used to be grey; the color of the state was even more insipid. Karamustafa had been immersed – with inquisitiveness, but never directly unless it involved her personal story – in the lives and cultures of settlers and immigrants through comparable objects. She did not mystify others’ conditions nor make them heroic. This was an especially onerous undertaking at a time when different cultural expressions were either dismissed or exploited cynically, as her aesthetics implied complicity with ‘kitsch,’ while she sought a confrontation with the fabric and traces of life.
Forty years later, in 2012, I visited her studio in a decrepit house battered by time and neglect in what used to be a Greek quarter in the old city. She shared an extraordinary series of modest paintings of everyday life in a women’s prison where she had done time at the beginning of the 1970s. She’d painted them after being released but had never shown them to anyone. There were many political prisoners at that time; novelists wrote about terrible tortures; time inside was not to be bragged about. That she tussled with a vocabulary inviting the folkloric – from the inside, as it were – may also have deterred her from showing the works at the time. These paintings are in stark contrast to Die Bühne (1998), an installation concerning the same period. Die Bühne (The Stage) is a dark room featuring a large photograph of Gülsün Karamustafa and her husband, taken in the courthouse as they received their prison sentences. A searchlight scans the room, projecting the words “regime. Control. ideology. stage.” If the prison paintings spoke to a lived, collective experience, the installation was about the surgical moment that separated husband and wife, two idealists struggling for a better future, sent to different prisons for different periods, and denied passports for more than 15 years.
Karamustafa’s works from the early 1980s onwards were already ripe in a situation with a minimal audience, tolerant local dismissal, and no critical reception. When we became friends in 1990, she would often tell me how lonely she was despite seeming to know everyone. Very much like a writer, she had been conspiring in private, developing the larger picture —a picture that we were lucky to have realized, even if years later. Few at the time could afford not to shun the cultural situation brought about by the massive influx of inter-city immigration, entrenchments, and the new urbanism that ensued as an inferior alternative to middle-class high culture and its machinations. Meanwhile, the massive immigration and displacement were addressed in profound ways by writers like Latife Tekin, as well as in vital areas of sociopolitical comics magazines. It was only Karamustafa who truly embraced the situation. Instead of divorcing herself from the urgencies and opting for rarefied art production, she was so severely aware of another possibility. She registered a world in flux, joy, self-pity, and perpetual displacement. In literal and metaphorical isolation, I remember her saying that she used to weep as she worked and worked as she cried.
The opening of Euroamerican art institutions to a larger world after 1989 kept Karamustafa busy. She engaged in the exodus of immigrants and refugees while dealing with expectations posed on her as a woman artist from a Muslim country that has contributed to massive migration to Western Europe from the 1960s onwards. Her practice belongs to the museum, and she has been doing work without ever shying away from being acutely observant about stories that have been swept away by determined indifference. She constantly reminds us of her art’s revelatory potential to imagine the world differently, caring for where it hurts with grace and integrity.
vasıf kortun 