Turkey

Gülsün Karamustafa is one of the most influential artists for the younger generations. Through her art practice, spanning over fifty years, she focuses on such topics as the modernisation of Türkiye, uprooting and memory, migration, locality, identity, cultural difference and gender from an array of perspectives. Her works stem from both personal and historical narratives. Through media as diverse as painting, installation, photography, video and performance, she calls into question historical injustices in the social and political fields.
At the Biennale Arte 2024, the artist presents her installation Hollow and Broken: A State of the World. Just like the dialogue, as deep as the sea, between human and space, she stands both in and outside of the latter. Extending her gaze from the ground on which she stands in the city of Venice to Istanbul where she lives, she takes in the disasters that have occurred across the surface of the Earth. From wars to natural and human-made crises, devastation and grief – both of which are becoming more ordinary each day – to altered values, and from there to the world’s hollowed, empty core that both swathes and sinks into it. In this work Karamustafa lets us into the brittle relationship she has built with a world where she feels “more of a foreigner perhaps than anybody else”.