Parallel Lives, Parallel Aesthetics, Eindoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2022
Gülsün Karamustafa’s exhibition and publication at Van Abbemuseum between 27 November 2021–13 March 2022, Parallel Lives, Parallel Aesthetics is a retrospective of the works of León Ferrari and Gülsün Karamustafa.
The exchange was conducted over email in April and May 2021.
Dear Gülsün,
We have known each other for over thirty years; I have written about your work numerous times. On occasion, we traveled together and talked in public. I cannot disassociate our histories or write with detachment here because significant events such as the dissolution of Turkey’s “First Republic,” the state socialism in our neighboring countries, and the present situation have all affected us. I watched the cyclical nature of your practice and how you return to give attention to the beginnings and ends of the 20th century in our region, to internal and cross-country migrations, and to the bitter transformations of Istanbul. I have also followed your embrace of popular idioms and materials, the pictorial language of late Byzantine icons, and the adjustment of particular cinematic languages depending on the story you want to tell. You cannot move away from being a storyteller, visiting the moments repeatedly in different works, sometimes years apart.
Gülsün Karamustafa:
Dear Vasif,
We indeed have a long history. Though my timeline goes far back, nearly reaching the middle of the last century, the moment we met was at a crucial time for us and the world. I was one of the artists in your first exhibition as a young curator returning from the United States in 1991. It has a special place in my artistic trajectory as the theme you introduced, `memory/recollection,` opened up a wide path for me to stroll along. The way I return to this topic over time and with intervals clearly shows the typical cyclical nature of my way of working.
Our second encounter was with the 1992 Istanbul Biennale. You gave birth to my work, Mystic Transport. By then, I had reached the endpoint of dealing with the 1980s and its relation to cross-country and cross-world migrations, and this new production was probably the best on the topic. Yet, it proved not to be the end and, as you say, I turned back many times to the subject because it kept returning. I have always wanted to tell this story of the movement of people, but from different points of view and using several media.
In this sense, I am a storyteller whose stories never seem to end. Whenever I think I am through with one of them, a reason comes to go back to the old story and rework or update it. It’s essential for me that this ‘update’ never allows me to touch the old work but rather to make a new work dealing with the old topic at another time and in a different situation. Through the distance in between, I find bundles of material floating in the air that allow me to dig into ideas I love to deal with. Some are light and easy to work with, but others are heavy and full of responsibility.
Vasıf Kortun:
How do you dedicate an idiom to a story? Your work spans so many forms and media. You made videos and video installations, black and white, in works like Stairway, Settler, and Men Crying. Men Crying was looking at the Turkish cinema of the time, and in Settler, color appears and disappears and plays a particular role in the way you associate it with memory. However, you embrace bright and brilliant tones in textile collages, works on paper, your engagement with posters, and even in Mystic Transport. Then there are works where the medium and presentation are exceptionally gentle and affectionate, such as Swaddling the Baby, Mother Painting, Etiquette, Couriers, or Genealogy. In all your works, I have never seen you tell a story without caring for its protagonists. I recognize here a symbolic breakdown of the distance between you and the stories you tell, including your relation to the viewer. Such intimacy and confidentiality could be questionable, but it is never so.
Gülsün Karamustafa:
In the 1960s, the Istanbul Fine Arts Academy taught us, as art students, to have a unique style. It always gave me the feeling that you would have to imitate yourself repeatedly and how you work until you become accepted as an artist with a distinct style. I hated and rejected it, and this attitude nearly put me in danger of not graduating.
This may be why I am meandering through many mediums, such as painting, installation, and video making, until I find the right tool and the occasion to express myself. It is also a schizophrenic condition for me to go in between extreme colorfulness and the black and white, which I frequently do. It is like living high moments full of adrenaline and then falling into dark, depressive feelings. I relate this situation to a bridge with one end cheerful and another gloomy that I always have to pass along. Nowadays, I am more in control of those imaginative moments. I know when and why I refer to color or black and white. I understand that both attitudes are a part of my inner articulation, and I use them whenever I need them.
The other thing that continually surprises me is the names I give to my works, which are always significant. I wonder if those names appear before or after the body of work becomes visible. It works together with the content but needs quite a long process to reach any finality. I have to mesh the bundle of thoughts, visible or non-visible material, and pass them through a long minimization process before bringing the work to life. After such a painstaking elimination, this is how the symbolic breakdown you mention in your question enters the scene and creates the closeness… but there is also always distance.
Vasıf Kortun:
Is there anything you regret? You and Sadık (Karamustafa) have paid dearly for the decisions you have made in your life. I do not doubt that you both fell ill in recent years, which may also be due to past troubles. It takes a toll on you. I realize it is a complicated and perhaps obscure question, but I have always been overwhelmed by your works’ deep sorrow, frailty, and naive stubbornness. The viewer sees the before and after of a trauma, but you are in it when making it. The Settler imagines a land to which she will have to adapt. The Apartment Building tells the bitter tale of people who presumed they belonged to a place that was to oust them. Your stories, primarily told through individuals, children, and women, are layered, concrete, and transcend beyond artistic jargon. And, beyond regrets, what do you want to do that you may not have touched on before?
Gülsün Karamustafa:
The last seven years of our lives were full of ups and downs. Sadık and I are both cancer survivors. In 2014, at the height of my success following the SALT exhibition, I received a cancer diagnosis. So, I decided to take the best care physically but to forget it mentally, as I was willing to continue eagerly with what I was doing. A few months after the therapy, I was in Sao Paulo attending the Biennial and, at the beginning of 2015, had two big solos in two different venues in Brussels. The following year, I had the Hamburger Bahnhof exhibition.
The second strike came in 2019 with Sadık’s more severe diagnosis. It was a time we decided to live between two cities, Berlin and Istanbul. It was a decision after the 15th July 2016 events, feeling that we could not bear another coup in our lives. He had to undergo heavy chemotherapy for over ten months. As a caregiver, I was more anxious this time, but to my surprise, he took it lightly and kept my spirits up, and we survived.
We spent February 2020 in Berlin. By chance, we had tickets to return to Istanbul on 4th March for personal reasons. It was one of the last flights before the total lockdown in Europe and Turkey, and luckily, we were home. Corona was relaxing and soothing for us, which may seem odd. Having the practice from before, of being locked up for long periods, was not a big problem. Also, just having been through serious health problems, we did not think much of the severity of the situation until it convinced us through the thousands of deaths it caused. We both had work commissions. I was painting, Sadik continued his lectures online, and maybe we buried ourselves in our work as we always do in times of crisis.
I say this in answer to your question and to show how I cope with difficult times in my life. There is always a way to escape, but at the same time, many feelings are buried deep. When I start a new work, I usually choose or feel an urge to search for those hidden moments to trigger a new narration. This is the way to reach the core of the story for me.
I am working on two small new video films for this Van Abbe show. One of the films will focus on my mother, while the other will focus on my father. Each film, akin to a brief ode or song about forgotten moments, will span approximately five minutes. All will be based on very personal family photos. I do not wish to emphasize the story; it will not be a nostalgic lament over a lost time. They will only be about a mother and a father. They will probably be the fragments of longer forthcoming films, which will also include the daughter in the future. This is a project I’ve been thinking about for a long time. Anyway, I cannot keep myself from saying that even those little fragments will not keep themselves from being the mirrors of the enforced modernist times our country passed through and inevitably left behind.
Vasıf Kortun:
In your early practice, blending popular imagery and social realism, images of heroic, selfless men would take priority. It is far from Men Crying. Immediately after prison, it seems women began to assume agency. In both practice and subject, you took a suggestive path, knitting as an act of putting things back together, swaddling as a form of sheltering and shielding, and celebrating figures such as Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky in Modernity Unveiled. Then, there are more dramatic, celebratory feminist works like Panther Society. I remember your support of the Women’s Works Library and Information Center Foundation. Also, in all three feature movies you worked on, the stories were by feminists Latife Tekin, Pınar Kür, and Füruzan. It all feels effortless and straightforward, things as they should be.
Dear Vasif
Since my early twenties, I have been within feminist groups defending women’s rights. The first was the `Revolutionary Women’s Association` (DKB). Renowned novelist and activist Suat Derviş founded it. I had the chance to meet her before she died in 1972. The DKB group interpreted feminism as an extension of socialist thought. Later, I witnessed and participated in many groups and changes and participated in the first Women’s Liberation Parade in London in 1971. I followed and tried to contribute to the continuous changes and advanced discussions on gender issues in the 1980s. I tried to be as available as I could.
My interest in women or gender stories never ceases. Sometimes, they appear around critical issues, such as in my installation Kültür. The work dealt with the hypocrisy of a nation. While disregarding the torment and forced eviction of trans individuals from their homes in the center of the city for the sake of gentrification, they watched and enjoyed prime-time TV with their celebrated transvestite showman and a popular transsexual singer, all around the same hours in the day.
I also play with the idea with a flare of fantasy in The City and The Secret Panther Fashion. For me, the panther pattern (which I frequently refer to in my works) is a symbol of freedom and flamboyance. The panther fantasy house the two women run for those wishing to escape their dull and tiring lives is a true paradise. They come and enjoy this unique atmosphere that keeps them away from their anxieties and daily worries. It is a pity that, in the end, we witness these women always having to return to their lives to cook for their husbands and children.
Vasıf Kortun:
Your father was a prominent character in Turkish broadcast history. His figure seems to embody the “Republic”; your mother is the continuity, and there is no battle there. You have been a chronicler of a century where momentous events are the setting for intimate stories, often pivoting around Istanbul and its long shadow. Where does the past take you? Have you taken shelter in this city in the past? After so many deprivations, pogroms, and wipeouts, do you still feel a sense of belonging there? Yet, you stay and attempt to appease the incurable.
Gulsun Karamustafa:
Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have been in Istanbul, spending much of my time at home and not moving anywhere except for Ayvalık, where we spent two months also indoors. I have a balcony without a view, and from my front window, I only see a street crowded with cars massed in front of the neighborhood’s parking garage. To my surprise, I found out that I did neighborhood at all. It is a bizarre feeling for me. It has nothing to do with nostalgia, fancying the old times, denouncing the atrocious interventions on the city fabric, or losing interest in things that always occupied me until then. It was just a numbness that I was feeling.
Two years ago, I spent much time on the sixth floor of a hospital overlooking the city’s newest part with high buildings. Waking up in the middle of the night and finding yourself within a city silhouette you cannot associate with the city you knew from before made me feel like a somnambule (sleep-walker).
It was a delightful coincidence to receive an invitation from a friend, curator Ruth Noack, for a show called “Sleeping with a Vengeance, Dreaming of a Life.” This is how my work “Somnambule” came to life. It included a screenshot from Harold Lloyd’s 1920 film `High and Dizzy` and a video on Istanbul’s ugly towers. Lloyd’s is about a sleepwalker who walks on the edges of New York’s skyscrapers while his lover tries to protect him with funny gestures. It is a hilarious film teasing the flowering of the new architecture of the city. However, my work dealt with a bit more severe issues, given that the architecture is not new anymore and the spirit of its construction is very different.
I have no wish to bury myself in the city’s past. I loved to investigate and follow up with the changes that happened around me in the old days, and I was amazed by this dynamic, but right now, I am in a very different mood. It is a kind of nonchalance. I do not care or wish to take care as I did in the old times; still, I cannot keep myself from thinking and working on the city. I am preparing an installation for the show in Van Abbe, which also reflects my town’s tragic past. It consists of four wooden columns and four washbasins of tin. The columns were recuperated from a once well-established house in Istanbul, now demolished. I decided to fill the washbasins with water from the city’s Byzantine cisterns. The basins also relate to when the city’s water resources could not meet the spiking needs of massive migration. For a very long period, these tin utensils served newcomers as the only way to bathe. The name of the installation is, again, important to me. “Stoic City.” I believe the fate of cities changes from time to time. There may be some moments when they have to be resilient and patient, enduring the utmost torture. Yet there can always be hope to overcome the situation, as they have longer lives than humans. I do not know how much strength and time I have to observe and endure this terrible decline of Istanbul right before my eyes. It pains me, but it will pass.
Vasıf Kortun:
I share your despair, and I cannot even fathom what it means to witness your hometown ravaged like this at your age. It is far from the melancholy (hüzün) that Orhan Pamuk once wrote about an earlier Istanbul. We lived a life and tried to share it but could not defend it.
vasıf kortun 