Gülsün Karamustafa

Stage, 1998, Digital print and projection, 110 x 130 cm

The source material for the painting is a portrait photograph taken from a webpage. Technically, the work was produced using acrylic paint, stitching, and lace appliqué on lightly primed canvas. Departing from the conventions of academic traditionalism, the aesthetic language that shapes the portrait’s painterly structure employs a reductive visual vocabulary composed of black and very pale pink. During the 1971 military coup, mass arrests were carried out across every segment of society. Thousands of workers, intellectuals, and students were tried for extended periods in military courts and subsequently sentenced. My work titled Stage was developed around a press photograph that I encountered while going through my archive twenty-seven years later. In the photograph, Sadık Karamustafa and I are standing before the court as the judge reads aloud the sentence imposed on us at the time for the offence of harbouring.

In 1998, while preparing for an exhibition in Berlin—a city whose past is marked by political upheaval—I confronted this photograph and realised that the moment had, by then, transformed into a “stage” for me. I completed the work by adding a halo of light to the space I had constructed, recalling the searchlights installed around prisons to maintain security through their constant movement. Inscribed upon it were the words REGIME / IDEOLOGY / CONTROL / STAGE. The work was then complete and ready to be presented.