Anti-Hamam Confessions, Gulsun Karamustafa, at Rodeo, Istanbul

Anti-Hamam Confessions, Gulsun Karamustafa, at Rodeo, Istanbul

By TRoueche | Published: May 27, 2011

Rodeo continues to be one of the most exciting art spaces in Istanbul; displaying a quality of art, and an international, avant-garde awareness that is all too often missing from spaces in the city. This year has already seen fantastic shows of the work of James Richards and Gabriel Lester, and curator Sylvia Kouvali’s latest offering is no less impressive. Anti-Hamam Confessions is a thoughtful work by veteran artist Gülsün Karamustafa, which draws upon her personal relationship with hamams.

Karamustafa’s work is essentially about her dislike of turkish baths. A video-piece, it explores a hamam in Tahtahkale built by Mimar Sinan, which has been turned into a shopping centre, whilst a voiceover describes her hatred of ‘these places’. For Karamustafa, growing up in modern apartments with bathrooms, there was never any need for the hamam; indeed she has never been to one. Instead she began to hate these historical monuments, and the way in which they are interpreted by tourists. At the heart of her work is an annoyance with the orientalising gaze of the West and the way in which it is applied to the citizens of Istanbul. By presenting a Sinan hamam which is now a shopping centre, Karamustafa questions these perceptions. Meanwhile the slow dripping of the water becomes unbearable – a form of water torture rather than the sound of a hamam – jarring with the building’s new function.

Karamustafa is a veteran of the Turkish art scene but continues to provoke and surprise. Elsewhere her work, most recently Etiquette at the IFA galleries in Stuttgart and Berlin and The Monument and the Child at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, have drawn on similar ideas of memory, history, and identity as well as exploring the problematic of orientalism, to great acclaim.

May 27 – June 25, Rodeo, Tutun Deposu, Lüleci Hendek Caddesi No 12, Tophane, 34425 Istanbul

via Anti-Hamam Confessions, Gulsun Karamustafa, at Rodeo, Istanbul.