Gülsün Karamustafa
An Ordinary Love
21 January–15 February 2014
Rampa Istanbul
Şair Nedim Caddesi No: 21a
34357 Akaretler Beşiktaş
Istanbul, Turkey
T +90 212 327 0800
F +90 212 327 0801
info [at] rampaistanbul.com
An Ordinary Love reunites viewers with the artist’s 1984 work An Ordinary Love, which was presumed to be lost. Karamustafa presents her 2011 installation titled Shrine Online alongside the fabric collage An Ordinary Love. These two works, produced in different periods and geographies using different materials, propose diverse readings of the transition of the cultural codes that the artist has been pursuing for three decades. While An Ordinary Love speaks through an aesthetics that emerges from the migration of the village to the city, Shrine Online explores a similar fracture via mass production and contemporary consumer systems.
An Ordinary Love is the second fabric collage rug Gülsün Karamustafa produced in scope of the nine collage rug series she made between 1983 and 1986, and was awarded the Contemporary Artists Exhibition Prize in 1985.
The wall rugs and kitsch objects that adorned the interior spaces of shantytown houses and the popular color and style trends of the 80s which constituted the basis of the hybrid culture emerging from the rapidly momentous phenomenon of migration from the rural to the urban provided the inspiration for the artist in making these wall rugs. The primary material of the fabric collage rugs she produced in this period are the materials used by people who migrated to the city at that time.
The research conducted for the artist’s comprehensive exhibition this year has revealed An Ordinary Love, presumed to be lost because it was not returned from Grenoble where it had been sent to be exhibited 25 years ago, had in fact been preserved by an arts patron, upon which the work was retrieved.
Artists’ works are in constant circulation for exhibitions in the international sphere. Resolving the transportation and customs problems they frequently encounter at international exhibitions requires plenty of labor. Karamustafa has been searching for new ways to minimize these problems for many years. The installation titled Shrine Online is one of the best examples of this quest. Shrine Online, which was exhibited in New York in 2011, combines pedestals and colorful porcelain bird figurines purchased online. Karamustafa bought all the materials she will use for her installation from online stores or Internet auctions and had them transported to New York. The artist then makes her intervention and produces her installation by bringing together these pieces. The artwork creates a colorful shrine with various species of birds perched on cast pedestals and evokes the “union of technology with the traditional and the sacred” through its production process.
Media relations
For additional information, images or to request an interview please contact:
Üstüngel İnanç
T +90 212 327 0800 / uinanc [at] rampaistanbul.com
