KUTLUG ATAMAN

Kutlug Ataman: Lives lived

Ataman is an artist whose medium is people’s lives that, for him and for us, take form in the words they produce …he brings one world to another.(1)

Kutlug Ataman’s practice is profoundly and unapologetically humanist. He mostly investigates people – their foibles, tragedies and joys – through the medium of film, both in conventional cinema narratives and quasi documentaries, as presented in this exhibition at Sherman Galleries.

The artist also makes DVDs of ‘abstracted’ Islamic script, playfully commenting on the Muslim prohibition of overt imagery in art. These quirky and elegant works take us to a world of ancient artmaking and aesthetic–political rebellion, refigured through the medium of film.

Ataman uses film to reveal the world to us and, in part, to celebrate its intricacy and pain – particularly at the outer edges of human experience. He lovingly explores the lives of outcasts and discards, bringing to his investigations a sensitivity and warmth that is at the same time deeply moving and bitingly savage, demanding that we rethink our cultural beliefs, stereotypes and societal smugness, while glorying in the pageant of humanity.

Ataman’s art is certainly not art for art’s sake. Through a kind of ongoing, filmed melodrama he deepens our apprehension of what it is to be human in a difficult and uncaring world. He exaggerates in order to reveal – indeed, the people in his works mirror ourselves, enlarged, overstated and theatricalised. Such transformations reveal Ataman’s own powerfully compassionate apprehension, as well as something much broader, concerned with the nature of human suffering and loss.

In 99 Names, 2002, a lone male figure rocks backwards and forwards, his eyes determinedly closed to the world. He is oblivious. Rocking faster and faster – across five separate screens – he builds himself into a fierce trance, which appears self-destructive and frightening. He cries and pummels his chest in apparent abandon – as in dedicated religious frenzy. But what is expressed in this work is more than ritual frenzy; it is a representation of human despair, expressed baldly, but vehemently, through the agency of the image of a single, beautiful man apparently lost in his own immediate suffering. While 99 Names borrows from the language of religious ecstasy, the work deals with the reality of spiritual loss.

Martin is Asleep tenderly documents a nude, male sleeping figure, alone on a small bed. The figure is Martin Fryer, Kutlug Ataman’s partner of many years. As in Andy Warhol’s Sleep, 1963 – which is another ‘portrait’ (of the poet John Giorno, Warhol’s lover at the time) – there is vulnerability as well as muted sexuality expressed in Ataman’s beautiful work, as well a deep human compassion. Warhol’s Sleep was his first foray in experimental filmmaking and was excitedly received, despite only nine people attending the initial screening. Ataman’s portrait comes as part of a long-term and dedicated career in film – and is the product of a very different sensibility, one with compassionate documentary at its heart.

The Küba project, exhibited off-site in 2005 by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney – and originally commissioned by Artangel, London – is the study of lives lived in Küba, Istanbul’s notorious working-class ghetto.

Küba is named after Castro’s communist republic, still blockaded by the United States, and consequently suffering pariah status by most of the rest of the world. The work Küba documents some of the lives of its outcasts and refugees. Built scantily of second-rate building materials and separated from the main city, Küba, with its poverty and huge crime rates, confronts the increasingly wealthy and mobile Turkish middle class. Its citizens are ignored, rejected and alienated.

In Hero, 2004, Ataman documents the thoughts of a shy young man, Hakan, a resident of Kuba, whose great love is the music of the South American pop star Enrique Iglesias. The song Hakan loves most is Hero, which tells a simple story about a lover who sacrifices his life in order to save that of the girl he loves – as Hakan says, the ‘way it happens in old Turkish movies. It was good. I was moved … I was jealous because I’ve never been able to do anything like that.’

Hero, like the other pieces in Küba, expresses the poetry as well as the chaos of lives lived in such a site – where, however, a spirit of community is ever present, defining individual identity and a sense of place. Our particular hero is Hakan, of course, whose tender thoughts and longings bespeak much about loss and self-abnegation. He speaks directly to camera:

I don’t have a girlfriend. Of course you’ll ask why … There’s shyness. I mean I can’t talk … For two or three years I haven’t had a girlfriend. I don’t think it will happen, it’s very difficult. I’m shy, I can’t get rid of it … I think I’m ugly. They won’t like me.

There is great sadness here, the kind easily recognised by us as we confront our own uncertainties about loneliness and rejection. Hakan, a young man we hope will be happy, speaks to us directly, in a language both simple and eloquent, expressing his fears and hopes.

What is presented by Ataman in this work, as elsewhere, is ‘documentary’ filmmaking of a high order, where individual identity is fashioned through the very process of filming. Ataman, focusing intimately and lovingly on a life as it is lived, lends us the gift of insight and empathy. As he says himself:

I allow my subjects to talk because in actual speech can we witness this amazing rewriting of one’s history and reality. What else is there? Talking is the only meaningful activity we’re capable of.

(1) Bill Horrigan, 'Küba', exhibition catalogue, Artangel, London, 2005, p. 1

Simeon Kronenberg


KUTLUG ATAMAN: Excerpts from a review by Alex Gawronski

Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman, through his various narrative videos, delves into the private worlds of numerous obsessive individuals and outsiders. Often using multiple projections, Ataman casts an ostensibly documentary eye over the activities of people who, for various reasons, appear disassociated from the normative demands of mainstream urban preoccupations. Connected with such interests, Ataman draws implicit comparisons between the obsessions and compulsions of the individuals he portrays and traditional representations of artists as similarly ‘mad’ and ‘irrational’. Not surprisingly, two central works in the exhibition Perfect Strangers explicitly focus on the obsessive collecting habits of those dedicated to propagating and amassing ‘objects’ of beauty; on the one hand, prized flowers and on the other, rare and brightly coloured motifs.

Surprisingly, Ataman’s video ruminations on the lives and obsessions of the individuals he portrays generally exude an air of cool neutrality, seemingly at odds with the passions of those depicted. That is not to say Ataman’s work elides political or socially controversial topics though. Indeed, his revelation of the plight of Istanbul’s transvestite community is frank and compassionate, as is his treatment of the stories of a female cancer sufferer, mortified at what she perceives as her waning physical attractiveness. Indeed, Ataman’s works are virtually all imbued with suggestions, ambiguous and fleeting of what socially constitutes beauty. Such concerns again are marked by conceptions of beauty that stand outside those normatively inscribed by mainstream society. These underlying ideas in Ataman’s work also stray into spiritual and existential territory, as he investigates the marginalised beliefs of persons convinced they are living second lives …

Each of the works … enables particular chosen individuals to ‘speak’ in their own terms. Thus, the standard format of most of these works is the monologue. The implicit democratic impulse underpinning this ongoing project, giving voice to the stories of eccentric and marginalised others, while backgrounding the artist’s authorial role, is ultimately complex. Indeed, it could be questioned whether such a process merely ‘vamporises’, for the sake of international museum audiences, the personal stories of people whose lives are often marked by genuine suffering and the effects of marginalisation … simply contributing to a more generalised museum spectacle of self-consciously displayed Otherness. Alternatively, by presenting the often extremely personal experiences of diverse, non-art world personae in a museum context, Ataman’s work draws parallels with the lives of seemingly ‘ordinary’ gallery goers, who regardless of external appearances, may have had similar experiences, hold similarly ‘obtuse’ beliefs or practice similarly obsessed hobbies … At their most forceful, the artist’s videos successfully question the limits of normative models, increasingly applied to contemporary societies as controlling ideals.

Excerpts from a review by Alex Gawronski of Perfect Strangers, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 22 June – 4 September 2005, published in Broadsheet: Contemporary Visual Arts and Culture, vol. 34, no. 3, September 2005, p. 186