Spanning
four decades of work across painting, textile, video, installation and mixed media, the exhibition
brings together early paintings from the 1970s through to the present day, with Karamustafa’s
monumental commission for the Turkish Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2024 at its centre.
The works are not arranged chronologically. Instead, the exhibition unfolds as a temporal maze,
tracing the deep formal and conceptual threads that run continuously through an oeuvre built
in the shadow of coups, political ruptures and the unrelenting pressures of capitalist modernity.

Gülsün Karamustafa (b. 1946, Ankara, Turkey) is an artist who lives and works in Istanbul, where she is recognized as one of the most important and pioneering Turkish contemporary artists. She received her MFA from the Istanbul Academy of Fine Art in 1969. Karamustafa has an extensive oeuvre distinguished by installations, paintings, sculptures, and videos that interweave political narratives with personal histories. Her work addresses questions of migration, displacement, military dictatorship, identity, cultural difference and acculturation within the contexts of orientalism and post-colonialism.