Ab-Anbar Gallery presents the first and most comprehensive solo exhibition of Gülsün Karamustafa in the United Kingdom, Remains of a Forgotten Promise.
Remains of a Forgotten Promise traces five decades of work by Gülsün Karamustafa, one of Turkey’s most outspoken and influential artists. The exhibition unfolds as a temporal maze shaped by a practice of gleaning, or gathering, what official narratives have overlooked and suppressed, in order to construct a self-serving vision of modernism. Within this maze, Karamustafa’s personal experiences surface from the ruins of official history, as she steps into side-paths and back-alleys that dominant narratives have excluded. Her practice makes visible the hidden systems that shape psychology, memory and society, and, in doing so, exposes the displacement and fragmentation produced by these authorities. Among these hidden systems, Karamustafa returns repeatedly to the promise itself as a structure of power: issued by systems of authority and given form through literature, monument, architecture, and civic image.