GÜLSÜN KARAMUSTAFA
As the ‘Queen Mother' of Istanbul art scene –I hope she wouldn't mind this nickname-Gulsun Karamustafa has pursued a prolific career expanding on a plethora of diverse themes. Here are a few, just to name some; the interstitial enunciation produced by the newcomers from the Anatolian province to the metropolitan cities of Turkey, as expressed in their folkloric kitsch and the new genre of ‘arabesque'; the cosmopolitan cohabitation of communities; the low-budget trade operating in the post-Soviet realm; historical accounts and the deconstruction of historical Orientalism; the use of photographic images from the personal archive and the corresponding, therapeutic effect of remembering; and so on…
For the critic, there are various paths to approach this expansive artistic output. These may range from the selection of the medium to the spatial dimension of the sets, from the political positionality of the artist to the relation she establishes between herself and the figures, who are filmed in her works. And yet, the two pieces selected for this exhibition foreground unmistakably the temporal dimension inherent in the Karamustafa's oeuvre. The installation with the title “Burying the Sleep” consists of two clocks designed in the 19 th century for public use. One of them is placed on a wall, proper to its functional position as if it still worked, and the other, also defunct, lies on a red cushion reminiscent of a sacrificial ritual. An uncanny feeling surrounds the clocks despite their stillness. As implied in the title, they impose a certain discomfort on the audience; a state of not having been enabled to come to terms with something; something that troubles the mind. The historical connotation of these two gadgets may give us some clues about that dilemma: For example, we can read the numbers inscribed on them in the Ottoman as marks of the drastic rupture in Turkish history, in which the ultra-modernist Republican Revolution replaced the official Arabic alphabet with the Latin one, swiftly changing all means of measure, including weight, length, and also the calendar. This urge for a ‘ground zero', starting from scratch and the abrupt disassociation with the Ottoman past may have offered a viable route for escaping from the collapsing bulk of an empire into a smooth and promising future but the spectre still haunts; the trauma still bleeds; the loss of a rich, multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan life hurts; and the non-ticking of the clocks causes sleepless nights. It's not melancholia, but a plausible way of mourning may be the key for some healing.
“Men Crying,” Karamustafa's second piece in the exhibition, is also about loss in different aspects. First, the three shots within the project re-enact a particular type of scene that was often used by the school of Yesilçam, the productive, local film industry which enjoyed popular acclaim during the 1960s and the 70s, but unfortunately ceased to exist as a consequence of the introduction of multiple TV channels and the hegemony of Hollywood industry on film distribution. Three actors in their sixties, the most famous ones of this era, are filmed by the most prominent director of this school. As for the short scenarios they were placed in, they cry for their beloved ones, we understand, they have somehow lost. As the cliché goes, this beloved is a woman-these three men personify the abandoned part; their cries belong to the fictional personas they stage. However, the actors cry for themselves as well-not so much as mourning for their glorious past and for their youth (the cinematic typology they belong to was labeled as ‘jon' deriving from the French word for young) but as a celebration of their profession, of their own affirmative passion for cinema.
(Erden Kosova)
