Atlas-Childhood: Cultural Memory in the Work of Gülsün Karamustafa 1

This article examines Gülsün Karamustafa’s practice from the mid-1970s to the present day through the motifs of childhood and the figure of the child. A pioneering figure in contemporary art in Turkey, Karamustafa explores cultural memory across tensions between tradition and modernity, migration and urban culture, oppression and dislocation. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of “infancy,” this article positions her work at the intersection of history and memory, nature and culture, cartography and re-mapping. Childhood emerges as a site where personal biography, political expression, and social transformation converge. Foregrounding Karamustafa’s use of textiles, the article advances the concept of “atlas-childhood” to describe a relational mapping of memory that refigures temporal and spatial boundaries as part of an attempt to reconfigure the relations between past and present, here and elsewhere, time and place, the local and the global.