1 minute read
Gülsün Karamustafa
from Tarjama/Translation: Contemporary art from the Middle East, Central Asia, and its diasporas
by ArteEast
TURKEY, 1946
17
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The work of Gülsün Karamustafa takes on sociopolitical issues with a subversive and flamboyant playfulness. A prominent artist in Turkey who has been working since the 1970s and has exhibited internationally, she has addressed global, national and identity issues through her work by the indirect use of metaphor and nuance. In The City and the Secret Panther Fashion, Karamustafa approaches translation by a witty use of feline camouflage.
Born in 1946 in Ankara, Karamustafa experienced political turbulence and rapid social change in Turkey in the 1970s and its aftermath, and this perhaps provides a motivating force for her work as a contemporary artist. She moves effortlessly across the media of video, sculpture and installation, and her works are polyvalent in their political, metaphoric or aesthetic import.
The video The City and the Secret Panther Fashion uses the rituals of dressing up and female adornment to maximal advantage. Offering an altogether new meaning to the phrase “sex and the city,” Karamustafa’s ensemble of female characters secretly meets in apartments where dressing up in the “underground” panther patterns becomes a subversive and pleasurable activity. The women dress up, invent new designs, photograph themselves, and eat
and drink—all indulgent and seemingly forbidden in the city outside—in this domestic space wonderfully described as a “paradise of panther pattern.”
Karamustafa’s scenarios are also reminiscent of the tableaux of orientalist painting, the legacy of which she has taken on in some of her earlier work. The excess and sensuality of the harem that the genre capitalized on are transformed into a kitsch paradise of female pleasure and narcissism that transgresses the exoticism of the male painterly gaze. The video is evocative of many readings, whether art historical, feminist or a commentary on taste; her work is rendered with a playful and clever directorial eye that nevertheless, opens up to larger issues regarding the quandaries of gender, domesticity, and the urban modernity of contemporary society.
Nurjahan Akhlaq
