In Between Two Screens: Trauma, Memory, and Subjectivity in Gülsün Karamustafa’s Work

ABSTRACT

Informed by psychoanalytic theory, this essay analyses two major video installations, namely The Settler (2003) and Memory of a Square (2005) by Gülsün Karamustafa, who is one of the best-known artists from Turkey. These two works are concerned with similar themes, such as trauma, memory, subjectivity, and spatiality, through certain stylistic choices which allow them to be evaluated and studied from a Lacanian perspective. Elaborating on Lacan’s topology of the Real in relation to trauma as well as his notion of extimacy, this paper argues that in both works, the questions of exterior/interior, reality/imaginary, and public/private are repeatedly posed and subverted, thereby creating spatio-temporal and epistemological ambiguity for the spectators. Both works include double-projection video installations, and the presence of the two screens with the simultaneous flow of images in each work not only mobilizes the viewer’s memory and facilitates their unconscious, but also invites them to contemplate their own history, subjectivity, and experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Gülsün Karamustafa
• trauma
• Jacques Lacan
• The Real
• Extimacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Why Is That Art: Aesthetics and Criticism of Contemporary Art, Terry Barrett gives an overview of Lacanian thought and its influence on art criticism. Barrett gives examples from art critics who utilize Lacanian theory in their analyses. For instance, “Psychoanalytic critic Hal Foster, in The Return of the Real, applies Lacan’s three cones of representation to Sherman’s Film Stills and other early works (1975–1982)” (Barrett, 2017, 186). Dan Cameron and Donald Kuspit show Lacanian influences in their writings on the oeuvre of American artist Paul McCarthy (1945–) (Barrett, 2017, 198–199). Along similar lines, Art Since 1900 (2016), a landmark study in the history and criticism of art, gives an extensive examination of the Lacanian frame of thought and exposes the ways in which Lacan’s thought is situated with regard to feminist critique, phenomenology, and semiotics, and thus provides a critical lens through which to examine artworks.

2 By comparing the dynamic mechanisms of mourning and melancholia, Freud emphasizes that melancholia borrows some of its essential characteristics from mourning, as both mechanisms involve “a reaction to the real loss of a loved object” (1917, 250). Mourning, however, follows a loss that has really occurred, whereas in melancholia one can neither know for certain what it is that has been lost, nor what she has lost in losing the other.

3 Lacan writes: “The function of tuché, of the real as encounter—the encounter in so far as it may be missed, in so far as it is essentially the missed encounter—first presented itself in the history of psycho-analysis in a form that was in itself already enough to arouse our attention, that of trauma” (1998, 55).

4 Along similar lines, Cathy Caruth comments that “The pathology [of trauma] consists, […] in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it. To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. And thus the traumatic symptom cannot be interpreted, simply, as a distortion of reality, nor as the lending of unconscious meaning to a reality it wishes to ignore, nor as the repression of what once was wished” (1995, 4–5).

5 Dylan Evans further explains, “Moebius strip is one of the figures studied by Lacan in his use of topology. It is the three-dimensional figure that can be formed by taking a long rectangle of paper and twisting it once before joining its ends together. The result is a figure which subverts our normal (Euclidian) way of representing space, for it seems to have two sides but in fact has only one (and only one edge). Locally, at any point, two sides can be clearly distinguished but when the whole strip is traversed it becomes clear that they are in fact continuous. The two sides are only distinguished by the dimension of time, the time it takes to traverse the whole strip” (1997, 116).

6 This points to the function of the fantasy in trauma, as Ann Kaplan notes: “Central to [the] theory of trauma is a motivated unconscious. In this case, the traumatic event may trigger early traumatic happenings, already perhaps mingled with fantasy, and shape how the current event is experienced” (2005, 32).