Can You Imagine Where the World Can Go?
Gülsün Karamustafa
Gülsün Karamustafa, ‘Hollow and Broken: A State of the World’, through 6 April 2025, La Loge, Brussels, la-loge.be
In virtually all of my works, I have striven, to the best of my abilities, to voice the state of the world. The Venice project is, again, the outcome of an intensive accumulation, again a many-paged, many-layered project, open for reading; only this time, I am more vulnerable than ever. 1
It is pleasantly warm in La Loge, a former Masonic temple in the rue de l’Ermitage in Brussels, where, braving the awful weather, I’ve come to meet Gülsün Karamustafa. Born in Ankara in 1946 and the author of a remarkably diverse body of work, Karamustafa was one of the leading cultural personalities of the second half of the twentieth century in her motherland Turkey. She is known for investigating situations of historical injustice in the political and social spheres. Former director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Udo Kittelmann2, describes her as a critical observer of migratory processes and globalisation and a chronicler of Turkish history, a ‘phenomenon between enforced Westernisation and occidentalist fervour’. In reference to Karamustafa’s analytical approach, Kittelmann has used the term chronographia – ‘an aesthetic form of subjective historical narrative at a particular point in time’.
As part of the Moussem Cities Festival, which focuses on Istanbul this year, La Loge is presenting a scaled-down version of Karamustafa’s exhibition ‘Hollow and Broken: A State of the World’, organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (under the direction of Bige Örer) for the Türkiye Pavilion at the 60th edition of the Venice Biennale in 2024.
Everywhere I looked, human relationships were hollow and broken
The American people have just elected their new president when I sit down with Karamustafa on a bench in the entrance hall. A few hours earlier, Donald Trump had predicted that the Golden Age of America is about to begin: ‘The future is ours. America will soon be greater, stronger and far more exceptional than ever before.’ Trump will sign a series of executive orders aimed at ‘the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense.’ The author of the exhibition with the telling title ‘Hollow and Broken: A State of the World’ says she is devastated by the results. ‘This is a new world. Everything is going to change because there are many leaders who would take this brutal style of ruling as a model. Can you imagine where the world could go? What is this? All the negotiated possibilities in terms of migration, borders, diversity and sexual identity that we’ve gained step by step, in our determination to push ourselves into a better world, have been cut off. Now we will face the consequences. I’m from the generation of 1968. When we were very young, we thought we were going to change the world. We believed it! (laughs) Then, little by little, we learned. Now we know that we cannot change the world – but we always have to think about how to deal with this situation. There is nothing else… except and always a possibility of fighting. Never giving up! Art has power!’
‘For a long time in the early ’90s we did bring our artistic practices into social space. It was a way of practising together and addressing social issues. Activism is another thing, it can be harsher and I respect that. Personally, I don’t believe that being on social media and talking are the solutions. These strategies can be useful but they shouldn’t be the focus. Young artists are quite vigorous when it comes to social issues. This really amazes me and makes me happy. Especially in Turkey, I see that artists are learning to work together instead of as individuals, away from the ego, which is a new development. This is an important sign. I respect it and I expect so much from it.’
Listening to Gülsün Karamustafa it becomes clear that reflection (thinking) and resistance (fighting) are at the core of her artistic practice. These gestures explain the urgency of her forms of expression, be they sculpture, installation, drawing, graphic work, film or even painting. Always, the work is closely tied to societal questions and to the place or city where it was made. In Venice, the turning point was an encounter with the glass factories in Murano, which had always fascinated the artist and with which she would now have the chance to connect. While preparing for the Biennale, however, Karamustafa was overwhelmed by the experience of heavy feelings triggered by the war that had just broken out in Ukraine. Kiev was under siege. ‘To think that this beautiful city, where I had participated in the ‘Arsenale 2012: The First Kiev International Biennale of Contemporary Art’, was now under fire, was extremely hard to imagine. Moreover, in the south of Turkey some fifty thousand people had perished in a devastating earthquake. And while I grappled with what to say, there was the incredible fact that war had started in Israël and Palestine.’
These crises became the new starting point for Karamustafa’s intervention at the Biennale. The words ‘hollow’ and ‘broken’ became a way for the artist to express herself: ‘Everywhere I looked, human relationships were hollow and broken.’
Columns have thousands of stories to tell
Karamustafa decided that the glass chandeliers from Murano, which she had dreamed would be the main protagonists in her installation for the Biennale, would no longer figure as mere aesthetic ornaments. She gave up on Venetian frivolity and plunged into the archives of the historic workshops in the Laguna, where she was shown countless pieces of loose glassware, some dating back hundreds of years. She discovered that throughout the centuries, glass factory owners had always kept a part of the products they sold, to be used as replacements for clients in case an item was broken. By assembling these bits and pieces of smashed Venice glassware into lustreware, Karamustafa layered a story on top of them, finding a form for her grief over the gruesome global geopolitical situation. To make the message crystal clear she even wrapped the glass objects in barbed wire. ‘The fact is’, she says, ‘I am from Istanbul. On every block in the city there is a synagogue, a mosque and a church. You look around and you see them all together. Although these religions preach peace and love, in reality they quarrel with each other. Countless lives are lost. That’s why the chandeliers are wrapped in barbed wire.’
After deciding to use the glass shards from the Murano factories, Karamustafa wanted to incorporate more raw materials in her intervention in one of the enormous Sale d’Armi, a former armoury of the Venetian Republic at the Arsenale site. As if by chance, on her way home after a working visit to La Serenìssima, she came across a picture on the internet of an empty mould for a column. The caption read made in China. For an artist who had always fancied the motif of the column, the object immediately seemed ideal for representing hollowness. ‘The moulds are the paragon of kitsch. They combine Ionic and Corinthian elements with Chinese graphics – probably the brand name of the manufacturer. Now many buildings in the Middle East use these kinds of columns for decoration. I even found some examples in Italy.’
‘When we start thinking about columns, we inevitably arrive at these power relations that give way to identity struggles, inequality, injustice, oppression and violence.’ – Gülsün Karamustafa
To prevent the loose columns (which Karamustafa never filled with cement in the Sale d’Armi) from falling down, the artist needed supporting elements. She surrounded the pillars with soldered iron struts, coloured red ‘as a warning sign’. Asked whether she associates the column with ancient Greek architecture and Athens as the birthplace of democracy, Karamustafa is nuanced: ‘Why not. Wherever you go – Istanbul, Greece, Egypt – columns have thousands of stories to tell. They are literally everywhere. Putting rings around a column now reminds me of the column of Justinian in Istanbul… What interests me is the moment when you’re installing a column in the centre of a city square and you decide to put a sculpture on top of it – that’s commanding. The column becomes something else. In the course of its history, the towering column of Justinian became richer and more elaborate as more elements were added to it. It spoke more and more loudly about might and imperial power. At that point it becomes a male and erect energy. When we start thinking about columns, we inevitably arrive at these power relations that give way to identity struggles, inequality, injustice, oppression and violence.’
Given that our built environment points to the ways in which we organise our lives, clearly Karamustafa’s work also deals with architectural issues. In a classical sense, a column ensures the survival of a building. It stands for skill, labour, knowledge and durability. It represents a particular architectural tradition, a visual culture, a symbolic language. Karamustafa says she deliberately doesn’t address architectural situations directly, but instead plays with the idea of architectural questions. She wants to move in a direction that allows her to use architecture to speak of other things.
As ‘footage’ to the contents of the installation shown in both Venice and Brussels, Karamustafa decided to include a digital video that consists of around 130 clips taken from unspecified protests and past scenes of conflict from all over the world. ‘We licensed them to make the film, which is very precise in its editing. It all starts around 1914 – we have some images from the war between Mexico and the United States. There’s never a date depicted. I wanted to do away with the eye of the photographer, who in my mind focuses on sensation or propaganda. I just put together images of the faces of the people. They look at you and let you know what is happening.’ For the soundscape, Karamustafa worked with the young and talented sound designer Furkan Keçeli. ‘He first made the sound for Venice, which was more robust and grand. For Brussels we wanted the soundscape to be more silent. I wanted the sound in the room to communicate the atmosphere and the feelings’.
I had unconsciously reproduced the Silk Road
In Venice, the installation ‘Hollow and Broken: A State of the World’ took centre stage in the Sale d’Armi. Now, at La Loge in Brussels, it inhabits a former Masonic temple. According to the artist, the new situation hasn’t changed the core of the work. If anything, the context of La Loge offers more ‘stability’. ‘Here, none of the three Abrahamic religions (Islam, Christianity, Judaism) have an overwhelming presence. Freemasonry encourages us to shape the world without counting on any interference from outside. It is a profoundly humanistic philosophy telling us to take our destiny in our own hands and to work from there.’
La Loge is an atypical Masonic temple insofar as it is a modernist building. Its forms are ‘reduced’, elementary in both shape and style. With its azure-coloured ceiling, lotus motifs and other decorative features – including a sun, moon and multiple winking stars – it has an interesting Mediterranean atmosphere that nicely echoes Gülsün Karamustafa’s Eurasian origins. ‘In the end, she tells me, ‘I realised that the moulds come from China, the red steel supports from Istanbul and the chandeliers from Venice. I had unconsciously reproduced the Silk Road. Historically, the republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire have been fighting for a very long time, even if the trade route stayed open. Thinking about our century, this idea makes me smile.’
An invitation to do better in the future
If the title of the installation ‘Hollow and Broken: A State of the World’ isn’t exactly uplifting, it isn’t a total implosion either. It’s an artist’s gesture, holding up to us a Venetian mirror that reflects where, what and who we are in this world, in our world, in the now. Like the eminent French writer François Mauriac, who once declared his fictional characters to be his ‘refusals’, Gülsün Karamustafa works ex negativo.
The artist admits that she likes ‘to create monuments for every subject and situation that must be fought for’. 3 As she’s said before, she doesn’t believe it’s possible to change the world immediately. Nevertheless, she reminds us that we always have to think about how to deal with this situation. The hollow columns, the archaeological situation, the chandeliers wrapped in barbed wire, all speak of the afterdays of civilization. Spending some time alongside them, we start to understand that they are both a wake-up call and an invitation to do better in the future.
In May 2025 Gülsün Karamustafa will have a small exhibition in Istanbul, in which she will address the concept of modernism in Turkey. The starting point will be the birth of the young Republic in 1923. It is a period that interests her deeply. Among other things, she wants to reflect on how the political paradigm that began with the Republic changed the position of the country, prompting it look towards Europe and ‘Europeanised’ ideas. ‘I have in mind a very important period, namely the end of the 1960s, when under president Eisenhower the US brought in an American military base in Turkey. I was just finishing middle school then. We were all Americanised. And we expected more American things: saddle shoes, bobby socks, nylon jupons… During this period, American soldiers from the base suddenly pushed into our lives. Six thousand American GIs were based in Ankara, where I was living at the time! They became the focus of the college girls, who admired them. Many of them had affairs with the soldiers, some even went to the US to live with them. Naturally, this caused great unhappiness for the families. Then the girls came back heartbroken – because America was not the America they had imagined for themselves. My upcoming exhibition will be about that. I want to turn it into a proposal without definitions, writings or imagery. Another part of the exhibition will be devoted to the new America, the America that is yet to come. What does Americanising Turkey mean today? Right now I have nothing to say. I am in despair. The situation is still very new, so we will just have to see how things evolve.’
As our conversation ends, I’m reminded of the words of Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, spoken at the inaugural prayer service at the National Cathedral in Washington on 20 January 2025, in the presence of the newly elected president, Donald Trump:
In public discourse, honoring each other’s dignity means refusing to mock or discount or demonize those with whom we differ. Choosing instead to respect, respectfully debate our differences and whenever possible, to seek common ground. And if common ground is not possible, dignity demands that we remain true to our convictions without contempt, for those who hold convictions of their own. (…) I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in democratic, republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the nightshifts in hospitals, they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.
- 1 Gülsün Karamustafa in: Gülsün Karamustafa. Hollow and Broken: A State of the World (exhibition pamphlet), the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) and Mousse Publishing, 2024 (for the Türkiye Pavilion at the 60th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia), p. 63.
- 2 Udo Kittelmann, Preface in: Chronographia. Gülsün Karamustafa, Melanie Roumiguière and Övül Ö Durmusoglu, Nationalgalerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2017, p. 9, 22.
- 3 Gülsün Karamustafa. Hollow and Broken, the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV) and Mousse Publishing, p. 18.