Working on the Stereotype: Mona Hatoum and Gülsün Karamustafa

Abstract

Informed by postcolonial theory, this essay analyzes the works of various women artists primarily Mona Hatoum, Gülsün Karamustafa, Emily Jacir, and Aydan Murtezaoğlu. The author demonstrates the artists’ desire to reject stereotypical perceptions of Muslim women and to deconstruct the image of the Muslim veil either as a symbol of oppression, or as a form of an erotic exoticism, both in the West and in their home countries. Their work is discussed with reference to clichés surrounding Muslim women, from the mysterious eroticism of the veil and harems in traditional Western art to contemporary rhetoric about the vulnerability of “oppressed” Muslim women in need of a white male savior. The author also reveals the artists’ criticism of attitudes to women in their countries of birth, and the ambiguity of their own identity as women located both inside and outside the hegemonic discourse. It is shown that the binary oppositions of man/woman and Orient/Occident are inadequate ways of understanding living reality.

Keywords:

• Mona Hatoum
• Gülsün Karamustafa
• Emily Jacir
• Aydan Murtezaoğlu
• Orientalism
• Jean-Léon Gérôme
• Neo-Orientalism
• contemporary women artists
• feminism
• postcolonial theory
• Homi Bhabha
• Edward Said
• Frantz Fanon

Notes

1. Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Ästhetik der Differenz. Postkoloniale Perspektiven vom 16. bis 21. Jahrhundert; 15 Fallstudien (Marburg: Jonas Verlag für Kunst und Literatur, 2010), 13.

2. Ibid., 11.

1. Translator’s Note: The neologism “Schlagbild” (pictorial slogan) was coined by Aby Warburg in 1920 in analogy to the German “Schlagwort” (slogan) to describe images with immediately recognizable political meaning. No equivalent has been established in English for it.

2. Gayatari Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (first published in 1988), in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory. A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 90.

3. Silke Wenk, “Imperiale Inszenierungen? Visuelle Politik und Irakkrieg,” in Sabine Jaberg and Peter Schlotter (eds), Imperiale Weltordnung—Trend des 21. Jahrhunderts? (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2005), 63.

4. Echolot. [oder 9 Fragen an die Peripherie], 1998, exhibition catalog, Museum Fridericianum, Kassel.

5. Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, “Jenseits der Sichtbarkeit. Der Schleier als Fetisch,” Fotogeschichte 76 (2000): 25ff.

6. David O’Brien and David Prochaska (eds), Beyond East and West. Seven Transnational Artists, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 64ff.

7. Salah Hassan, in David A. Bailey and Gilane Tawadros (eds), Veil: Veiling, Representation, and Contemporary Art (London, INIVA, 2003), cover.

8. See Marc Garanger, Femmes Algériennes 1960 (Biarritz: Atlantica, 2002).

9. Wolfgang Fetz (ed.), Some Stories, exhibition catalog Kunsthalle Wien (Frankfurt am Main: Revolver, 2005). The exhibition was conceived together with the Voralberger Kunstverein and shown in Bregenz, Graz, Damascus, and Aleppo (Syria). Mahrem. Anmerkungen zum Schleier. Non-Western Modernities, Project I, 2007, exhibition catalog, santralistanbul, Bilgi University, Istanbul.

10. Gerald Matt, “Some Stories,” in Fetz (ed.), Some Stories, 11.

11. Nilüfer Göle, “Geleitwort,” in Mahrem. Anmerkungen zum Schleier, 1ff.

12. An overview of racist visual stereotypes and the current debate on them in the exhibition catalog: Typisch! Klischees von Juden and Anderen (Berlin: Jüdisches Museum, 2008).

13. Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in idem, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 66ff.

14. Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism” (1927), in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1956–74), 152. On the concept of fetishism in ethnology and the sexual sciences, cf. Hartmut Böhme, Fetischismus und Kultur. Eine andere Theorie der Moderne (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2006).

15. Isolde Charim, “Der negative Fetisch—Zur Funktionsweise rassistischer Stereotype,” in Typisch!, 27, emphasizes the difference between Typisierung [typecasting], which fosters community, and Stigmatisierung [stigmatization], which divides people. Her concept of the stereotype as “negative fetish” leads to a psychology of racism that takes into account the primary function of visuality, but does not consider the aesthetic level of artistic critique.

16. Editor’s note: The original text in German wrongly stated that the artist edited the filmed photographs in London.

17. Mona Hatoum, interview with Claudia Spinelli, in Michael Archer, Guy Brett, and Catherine de Zegher, Mona Hatoum (New York: Phaidon Press, 1997), 141.

18. Michael Archer, “Mona Hatoum,” in Echolot, 9.

19. For her biography see Barbara Heinrich, Gülsün Karamustafa. My Roses, My Reveries (Istanbul: Yapi Kredi Yayinlari, 2007).

20. Türkisches Manierenbuch, Landesbibliothek Kassel, Ms. hist. 31; cf. Die Handschriften der Universitätsbibliothek Kassel—Landesbibliothek und Murhardsche Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel (Wiesbaden: Harrosowitz, 2000), vol. 4.3, 111.

21. Gülsün Karamustafa, Gülsün Karamustafa. 14 Works. Create Your Own Story With the Given Material (Istanbul: Mataş Matbaacilik, 1998), 64. “I wanted to prepare a special project for the show because Inclusion/Exclusion had a theme which interested me a lot. I wanted to make a contribution to it.”

22. For Osman Hamdy Bey’s “Turkish” Orientalism, see Roger Benjamin, Orientalism. Delacroix to Klee (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997), 243. On the feminist reception, see Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, “Sklavenmarkt in K. Zur Verkörperung verleugneter Erinnerung in der Malerei des Orientalismus,” in Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Karl Hölz, and Herbert Uerlings, Weiße Blicke. Geschlechtermythen des Kolonialismus (Marburg: Jonas, 2004), 37ff.

23. Roger L. Conover, Eda Cufer, and Peter Weibel, Call me ISTANBUL ist mein Name. Kunst und urbane Visionen einer Metapolis, exhibition catalog, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (Tübingen: Wasmuth, 2004), 106ff.

24. Andreas Baur and Roland Wäspe, “Öffentlich-Privat,” in Emily Jacir, exhibition catalog, Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (Nuremberg: Verlag für Moderne Kunst, 2007), 10.

25. Interview with Erden Kosova and Gülsün Karamustafa, in Christian Kravagna, Routes: Imaging Travel and Migration (Graz: Revolver, 2006), 45ff.

26. Reproduction in Vasif Kortun and Erden Kosova, Szene Türkei: Abseits, aber Tor! (Cologne: König, 2004), 31.

27. Aydan Murtezaoğlu, “Nude in the Mirror (after Diego Velásquez),” in Conover, Cufer, and Weibel, Call Me ISTANBUL, 110.

28. Vasif Kortun, in Kortun and Kosova, Szene Türkei, 63.

29. Ibid., 160.