Kutlug Ataman at Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2005) (press release)
artdesigncafé | café library | Released June 2005
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Kutlug Ataman. The 4 Seasons of Veronica Read (still), (2002).
Kutlug Ataman: Perfect Strangers
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney22 June - 4 September 2005
Kutlug Ataman has built his style out of the interview era. A consummate storyteller, he is the subject of a major upcoming exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art this winter.
Fascinated with the ways in which people tell their own stories, Kutlug Ataman’s film-based museum installations are portraits of individuals who live on the peripheries of society, defined by ghetto life, peculiar obsessions or transgressive sexualities. Themes of “otherness” and “obsession” run throughout Ataman’s works, individual stories blurring the distinction between fact and fiction as people construct their identities before the artist’s camera.
All of Kutlug Ataman’s subjects are friends or acquaintances. In his works he captures their true stories and real lives, making their idiosyncrasies and obsessions his own as he repeatedly turns them into works of art. The Carnegie Prize winner, Turner Prize short-lister and internationally renowned artist / film-maker travels to Sydney in June for the opening of his largest exhibition yet, and to attend the world premiere of his new feature film Two Girls within the 2005 Sydney Film Festival.
Born in Istanbul in 1961, Ataman began his career as a feature film-maker, studying film at the Paris Sorbonne and the University of California in Los Angeles. After finishing his degree, he received numerous awards for his independent feature films which include The Serpent’s Tale (1993) and Lola + Bilidikid (1998).
In 1997 he met Rosa Martinez, curator at the Istanbul Biennale, on whose suggestion Kutlug Ataman ventured into the art world seeking a different context for his work. In a very short time his museum installations received critical acclaim at the Istanbul (1997/2002) and Venice (1999) Biennales, Berlin Biennial (2000), at Documenta in Kassel (2002), and in numerous galleries and museums in Europe and the USA.
Kutlug Ataman’s museum works explore the ways in which we attempt to build our identity in words, how we explain ourselves and how we draw on both fact and fiction to create a sense of who we are that adequately sums us up for others. They take the form of interviews with people who have an interesting story to tell— their story. There are many gaps. There are some white lies. There are lots of ways in which words can never be enough. But there is also an authenticity that lies in the self-expression of a person seeking to say who they are, raw and unmediated, when asked.
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Curated by MCA Senior Curator Rachel Kent, Kutlug Ataman: Perfect Strangers also inaugurates his new work Küba (2004) in the southern hemisphere. Commissioned by Artangel, it is co-produced by five international institutions including the MCA.
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Kutlug Ataman. Küba (installation view), (2004).
Küba comprises forty battered thrift-store TV screens, each with their own comfortable, domestic chair— not unlike what we might see in the homes of the people they document. On each, one person tells their story straight to camera— an incredibly intimate conversation about lives that have led to this strange shantytown that is also a place of remarkable solidarity.
Other highlights of Kutlug Ataman’s MCA exhibition include The 4 Seasons of Veronica Read (2002) and Stefan’s Room (2004). In these two works we are introduced to Veronica Read, and the collection of 900 amaryllis plants and bulbs that crowd her small London flat; and to Stefan Naumann, a passionate collector and world authority on tropical moths. Raised from pupa to moth, then gassed and pinned into glass display cases, Stefan’s moths reveal as much about their collector as the creatures themselves. Veronica’s obsessive tending of her plants, and the uncanny mirroring of her fluctuating health and fortunes with theirs, is equally revealing.
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Kutlug Ataman. Women Who Wear Wigs, (1999). Installed at Lehmann Maupin, New York.
Also on display are four compelling stories about women and their wigs (Women Who Wear Wigs, 1999); a faded Turkish opera diva reflecting on her life, loves and losses (kutlug ataman’s semiha b. unplugged, 1997); a beautiful transsexual living in exile in Switzerland (Never My Soul, 2001); and a Turkish woman reflecting in two adjacent screens on the divided state of Cyprus (1+1=1, 2002).
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