Ab-Anbar Gallery is thrilled to present the first and most comprehensive solo exhibition of
Gülsün Karamustafa in the United Kingdom, Remains of a Forgotten Promise.
Remains of a Forgotten Promise traces five decades of work by Gülsün Karamustafa, one of Turkey’s most outspoken and influential artists. The exhibition unfolds as a temporal maze shaped by a practice of gleaning, or gathering, what official narratives have overlooked and suppressed, in order to construct a self-serving vision of modernism. Within this maze, Karamustafa’s personal experiences surface from the ruins of official history, as she steps into side-paths and back-alleys that dominant narratives have excluded. Her practice makes visible the hidden systems that shape psychology, memory and society, and, in doing so, exposes the displacement and fragmentation produced by these authorities.
Among these hidden systems, Karamustafa returns repeatedly to the promise itself as a structure of power: issued by systems of authority and given form through literature, monument, architecture, and civic image. Received, particularly by women, migrants, and peripheral subjects, as something to aspire to rather than something they were ever granted, the promise of progress, equality, and stability sustains its authority by remaining unfulfilled. Rather than asking whether such promises were ever kept, in Hollow and Broken Karamustafa turns to what remains once their failure is no longer concealed. Hollowed-out columns that cannot stand unsupported and chandeliers bound in barbed wire hang among the remnants of coups, wars, migration, imprisonment and ecological crisis. The work is an evidence that signifies history more truthfully than any official record.
Karamustafa works within the tension between promise and memory, a space in which the loss of memory is structurally necessary for the promise to retain its force. What is forgotten is repressed and returned systematically, given form through strategies of mirroring and symmetry. In Promised Paintings, an ongoing series spanning two decades, she rearranges the hands and faces of Istanbul’s Byzantine iconography into repeated gestures that point in unspecified directions, resolving neither into a promised past nor a promised future, holding the promise of their own temporal claim permanently open.
Istanbul is both the setting and the subject of Karamustafa’s storytelling: a city stretched between continents and cultures, where twenty-five centuries have layered into a dense fabric that resists any singular identity. Her work asks who holds the keys to the city, who defines it, who is entitled to its image, and who is written out of it, as in Porters Loading. The exhibition shows the many agents that have fashioned Istanbul’s image, from the Orientalist gaze seen in Anti-Hammam Confessions, to the Republic’s programme of Westernisation, and the successive migrants who have made it their home.
In works such as the Monthly Illustrated series, Karamustafa traces the remains of the radical shift that reshaped Istanbul in its passage from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic. Magazine cut-outs promoting European etiquette and imported European objects, all still inscribed in the old Ottoman script, expose the Republic’s claim of a clean break as a fiction. Modernity arrived first as image and aspiration, well ahead of the habits it set out to replace, leaving the old order lingering beneath the new like a second clock, still ticking in another time, as seen in Burying the Sleep.
Since the 1970s, Karamustafa has gathered objects and fabrics from Istanbul’s markets and streets, tracing how internal migration from rural areas to urban centres reshaped the city’s colours and textures. Found objects, ceramics, leopard print, gold lamé, quilted silk and textiles which arrived in Istanbul’s households alongside rural migrants, are stitched together in the register of kitsch in works such as Four Panthers, Two Praying Carpets, One Jesus, Baby Violinist, Stars and Tulles and For My Mother. Kitsch, so often dismissed as inauthentic, becomes here the most accurate register for the migrant experience it depicts: an object standing in for a desire it cannot satisfy, a promise of arrival or belonging endlessly deferred. It is dangerous precisely because it is seductive; the work must therefore maintain a critical distance from the material it invokes, resisting the temptation to collapse into the very form it examines.
Karamustafa’s inquiries into cultural identity have always gone hand in hand with explorations into her own history. Born in Ankara in 1946, the daughter of a well-known radio personality, Karamustafa was politically active from her student years; prosecuted by a military court following the 1971 memorandum, she was blocked from leaving Turkey until 1986. The experience of political repression enters her work with particular immediacy in her Prison Paintings. Karamustafa also often returns to her childhood, the period in which the state first extended its long arm into her private sphere, shaping how she spoke, behaved and understood herself, before its authority could be consciously questioned. In The Monument and the Child she appears as a small girl, pressed against a local monument from Ankara built as an emblem of the Republic’s authority. Resistance, it suggests, may begin as an overestimation of one’s own strength: a form of unknowing unavailable to official histories, whose authority depends on its own confidence in the solidity of its foundations. What Karamustafa ultimately exposes is the monument’s silence: about what such security costs and whom it serves, and the ways in which a state teaches its citizens, from childhood, to read power as natural.
Gülsün Karamustafa (b. 1946, Ankara, Turkey) is an artist who lives and works in Istanbul, where she is recognized as one of the most important and pioneering Turkish contemporary artists. She received her MFA from the Istanbul Academy of Fine Art in 1969. Karamustafa has an extensive oeuvre distinguished by installations, paintings, sculptures, and videos that interweave political narratives with personal histories. Her work addresses questions of migration, displacement, military dictatorship, identity, cultural difference and acculturation within the contexts of orientalism and post-colonialism.
Karamustafa has participated in numerous international biennials including Venice, IT; Istanbul,TR; São Paulo, BR; Gwangju, KR; Kyiv, UA; Singapore, SG Havana, CU; Thessaloniki, GR; Sevilla, ES. The artist has presented solo exhibitions at major institutions and galleries worldwide, including SALT Beyoğlu and Galata, TR; Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin DE; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; IVAM Institut d’Art Modern, Valencia, ES; The National Contemporary Museum of Athens, GR; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn, DE; Lunds Konsthall, Lunds, SE; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg [AT], Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, DE; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, DE among others. Her works have been included in the permanent collections of Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; MUMOK, Vienna; Wien Museum, Vienna; Warsaw Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Neues Museum Nürnberg, Nürnberg; EMST National Contemporary Art Museum, Athens; Istanbul Modern Art Museum and Arter, Istanbul.