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Installations produce more questions than answers as they investigate geographical identities
Two impressive video installations at the Vancouver Art Gallery use televisions to challenge our expectations of television. One is called Küba, the other, Paradise.
Created by Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman, both works are about two radically different places that don't appear to have anything in common: a poor, disenfranchised neighbourhood on the outskirts of Istanbul and a wealthy, privileged one in California. The works look different but are in fact similar investigations into how people construct personal and geographic identities and mythologies.
Riding on the escalator to the third floor, you can hear Küba long before you see it. It's as if you're heading into a wall of cocktail chatter: you can't make out what anyone is saying, but you can hear a cacophony of voices. Step into the exhibition space and you're faced with a surprising scene: a rectangular room full of television sets.
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Scenes from from Kba by Kutlug Ataman feature poor citizens of an Istanbul neighbourhood telling their stories.
Ian Lindsay/Vancouver Sun
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Font:****The sound comes from the TVs, each of which shows a different person talking in Turkish with subtitles. The TVs are all different brands, designs and colours, and they're sitting on an assortment of wooden coffee tables and stands. In front of each TV is a chair to sit on, but these, too, are completely mismatched: there are armchairs with floral patterns, wooden chairs with curved backs, padded dining room chairs, and everything looks second-hand and worn.
Placed in front of the TVs, the chairs are invitation to sit and watch but there's no designated order -- no numbers on the chairs for viewers to follow. Everyone chooses their own route through Küba.
The kinds of stories include the following: A woman wearing an Adidas jacket and a head scarf talking about kidnappings, murders and rapes in the neighbourhood who contradicts herself by saying, "In Küba, there is nothing to be afraid of"; a teenage boy with dyed black and gelled hair smiling impishly when he says, no, he doesn't have a girlfriend; and an elderly man prattling on while his wife listens quietly beside him and absentmindedly plays with a ring on the fourth finger of her right hand.
That's only a sample of the idiosyncratic stories that comprise the modern portraits in Küba. Although their narratives are generally addictive and engaging, you quickly get the feeling these stories go on and on.
In fact, the 40 people in Ataman's work talk for 28 hours -- far too long for even the most ardent art lover to listen through. But then that's in part Ataman's point. Moving through the stories of the residents of Küba is a metaphor for visiting any city or community: All you can ever hope to get are constructed, personal narratives from a handful of people about a place.
Ataman's Küba may be a constructed one but it is based on a real place. Küba emerged as an unofficial community outside of Istanbul in the 1960s that functioned as a safe refuge for left-wing Kurds, a self-identifying ethnic group in Turkey.
Introduced to the neighbourhood by a friend, Ataman spent a year getting to know the residents and breaking down barriers. He spent another year interviewing some of its 350 residents, who live in shacks crammed into an area equal in size to the footprint of the VAG.
Kevin Griffin , Vancouver sun
Published: Saturday, February 16,2008
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kutlu%C4%9F_Ataman
http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk/nwh_gfx_en/ART24650.html
Sometimes, not often, works of art drive you on to think beyond them, of issues and problems which they open up. The research project that has developed out of our engagement with Kutluğ Ataman’s work is called “Istanbul – Skin of the City†and it includes many materials; a stranger’s photographic cycle of the city of Istanbul by Stefan Roemer, an archive of wedding cultures throughout Turkey assembled by Nermin Saybasili (for MuHKA installation, 2006), a collection of photos of Ataturk gathered by Irit Rogoff, many hours of TV from Istanbul recorded by Ataman, books and magazines, some on our website, we have all encountered on the way. The works of art have made us work and in turn that work has been put forward not as a context but as a set of membranes which wrap around the video installations and complicate our relations to them. You might think that all these materials make this an exhibition about Turkey or Istanbul but it isn’t really, it’s about all of us and how we encounter difference and strangeness.
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