Opiniatrety

Carnegie International Blog: Kutlug Ataman

This is the first installment of my promised review of the Carnegie International. The artists are arranged in a certain order for the tour, and I'm going to review them in that order. It'll be just like looking at the exhibits yourself! Except instead of looking at the art you'll be reading my blog.

1. Kutlug Ataman, born 1961, Istanbul. Kuba, a video and furniture installation.

(I will be making an effort to cover more than one artist per entry as this goes on.)

1. Kutlug Ataman. You enter the exhibit and see an array of TVs on rickety tables facing rickety chairs. You hear a low hubbub, a crowd of voices. Each TV shows a repeating loop of an inhabitant of Kuba, a shanty town in Istanbul.

To see what's happening you have to sit down and watch the videotape (and read the subtitles, if you don't speak Turkish). The speakers present themselves, with no overt intervention from behind the camera--a woman telling how things were in her childhood; a young man talking about where he works, the girl he loves there, and the trouble she has with her family; an older man with a beard screaming incoherently. Each gives the museumgoer a sense of a life that's very different from the one we live.

There is far too much to take in in one sitting--I'm not sure how long the loops are, but most of the ones I watched didn't repeat in the time I was there. One of my informants thought that the thing to do would be to watch one a day for a month. But in a way part of the impact is this sense that there's too much to absorb--there's so many people in the shanty that you could never have time to know them all. And I found very compelling the way in which one story impinged on another--I would sit at one monitor and look over to read the subtitles on the next. Though most people were filmed alone in a room, and sitting in a chair you were communing with one person, this gave the sense of everyone crowded together--parallel lives in a small space.

The artist's bio says "There is no indication whether the stories that Kuba's residents tell are straight autobiography or fantasy, because Ataman is interested less in separating truth from fiction than in presenting the complex intertwining of the two." Before reading this I hadn't thought anyone was presenting themselves as fictional--though the screaming older man (who I saw later) did seem to be playing to the camera.

Kuba reminded me of the installation of Chantal Akerman's d'Est a few Internationals back--that also had banks of TVs running a sort of documentary. And I didn't find the films in Kuba as captivating as d'Est; Kuba is more like a straight documentary, less aestheticized than Akerman's slow pans over (e.g.) waiting rooms and train stations, capturing what happens when nothing's happening. But d'Est was extraordinary--the comparison is not fair.

Posted by Matt Weiner at February 23, 2005 04:12 PM