An Ordinary Love

Gülsün Karamustafa’s exhibithion “An Ordinary Love” at Rampa reunites viewers with the artist’s 1984 homonymous work, which was presumed to be lost.

An Ordinary Love
Karamustafa presents at Rampa 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 the artist has been pursuing for three decades. While An Ordinary Love speaks through an aesthetics that has emerged from the migration 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.
An Ordinary Love
Top: Gülsün Karamustafa, Shrıne Onlıne, 2011, Fiberglass cast pedestals with porcelain figures, dimensions variable. Photo: © CHROMA. Above: Gülsün Karamustafa, An Ordınary Love, 1984, Fabric collage, 175 x 245 cm. Photo: © CHROMA
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.  
An ordinary Love
Gülsün Karamustafa, An Ordınary Love, 1984, Fabric collage, 175 x 245 cm. Photo: Artist’s archive
Artists’ works are in constant circulation for exhibition in the international sphere in recent years. 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 figures bought online. Karamustafa acquires all the materials she will use for her installation from online stores or internet auctions and has them transported to New York. The artist then makes her intervention and produces her installation by bringing together these pieces she signs. 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.
An Ordinary Love
Gülsün Karamustafa, Shrıne Onlıne, 2011, Fiberglass cast pedestals with porcelain figures, dimensions variable. Photo: Artist’s archive

until February 15, 2014
Gülsün Karamustafa
An Ordinary Love

Rampa
Şair Nedim Caddesi No: 21a
Akaretler 34357 Beşiktaş
İstanbul, Turkey

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