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"“Unawarded Performances”" Gülsün Karamustafa Since the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989, the Turkish market of unskilled labour is increasingly being dominated by immigrants. The specific political conditions of migration and its motivations are depicted by the artist and film maker Gülsün Karamustafa by the example of a group of migrants in Istanbul: for “Unawarded Performances”, she has interviewed Moldavians about their working conditions. Without any documents, these women have to earn a living with the care of elderly women in wealthy middle-class households. This enables them to support their families in Moldavia and try to finance their children’s education. They are preferably being engaged for the care and household work in Istanbul because of their origin, Gaugasia in Southern Moldavia, since the similarity to the Gaugasian language enables them to speak and understand Turkish with ease. After the breakdown of the economy in Gaugasia respectively Moldavia in 1989, all of a sudden these women were confronted with a situation of poverty. Karamustafa responds to the specific situations. Some of the interviewees in “Unawarded Performances” remain anonymous. Other domestic servants are portrayed together with their employers inside the Istanbul flats in a composition of a photographic souvenir picture and documentation. The camera travels over the interior decoration and the pompous entrances of the houses, showing the completely differing working and class structures as well as the roles of the sexes, with which these women from a post-communist country are now being confronted in Istanbul. None of the interview partners has been working as a domestic servant before. Karamustafa does not only accentuate the different aspects of her interview partners’ lives, but also multiplies the media images of migration. Artist, born 1946, lives and works in Istanbul. |
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