Kutlug Ataman

By Mark Prince 2/4/11

View Slideshow View of Kutlug Ataman’s Stefan’s Room, 2004, four-screen looped video installation. All photos courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London.; Still from Paradise, 2006, 24-screen looped video installation.;

Istanbul In his 1989 essay “The Contingency of Selfhood,” the late American philosopher Richard Rorty proposed “self-creation” through metaphor as an alternative to the concept of an intrinsic human nature. He saw identity as a contingent linguistic construction—analogous to the imaginative narratives produced by a poet or fiction writer—rather than a constellation of preexistent universal traits. He went on to distinguish “fantasy” from “poetry”—fantasy being a dysfunctional metaphor which “other people cannot find a use for,” while “poetic metaphor” chimes “with some particular need which a given community happens to have at a given time.”

The films of the Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman straddle this line. While the works are formally diverse, one of Ataman’s primary methods—remarkably consistent, given the broad social spectrum of his subjects—is to train a video camera on selected individuals and listen to the stories they tell, usually about themselves. (Subtitles supply English translation when needed.) Ataman appears to subscribe to Rorty’s dual Wittgensteinian premise that our attempts at self-definition depend entirely on language, and there is no vantage point external to language from which we can qualify that discourse. “I don’t believe that people have definite identities,” the artist told Die Welt last November. “We are rewriting our identity at every moment” (my translation).

Born the son of a diplomat in 1961 and raised in Istanbul, Ataman makes films that both reflect and address “a given community,” frequently Turkish. In this context, an awareness of the contingency of language could not be more relevant: the Turks were impelled by law, within the space of a few months, to switch from an Arabic to a Roman alphabet when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the secular Turkish republic, imposed modernizing measures in 1928. At the press conference for “The Enemy Inside Me”—Ataman’s current midcareer retrospective at Istanbul Modern—he characterized the show as a symbolic homecoming. After earning an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1988, the artist lived for periods in France, several South American countries, Germany and England. He has now taken up residence in Istanbul again. During the past decade, his work has been shown in many museums internationally and included in Documenta and Manifesta, as well as the Venice, São Paulo, Moscow and Berlin biennials. He was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in Britain in 2004 and won the Carnegie Prize in the U.S. in 2005. Although he has garnered three film festival awards in Turkey, Ataman feels that his work has been largely overlooked in his native country, perhaps because a critique of Turkey’s society and politics has been a consistent subject, even if he has usually approached it from an oblique angle.

Ataman began his career as a documentary and feature filmmaker. As an 18-year-old, left-wing activist, he recorded the street protests that preceded the Turkish military coup of 1980; those early films—shot in Super 8—were confiscated and destroyed by the military authorities following a raid on Ataman’s house. He was arrested, imprisoned for 28 days, and subjected to beatings and electric shocks.

Last September, the prime minister, Recep Erdogan, passed a series of reforms, approved by a nationwide referendum, which shifted power from the military to parliament. The political immunity of the 1980 generals was lifted, exposing them to the threat of being brought to trial for their crimes. Ataman has now initiated legal proceedings against those who tortured him. Erdogan’s AK [Justice and Development] Party is conservative, with strong Islamic sympathies, which makes it an unlikely ally of the openly gay Ataman. Yet Ataman regards the mounting of “The Enemy Inside Me” as a sign of a climate of tolerance in Turkey, fostered by the AK Party despite its publicly espoused homophobia and nationalism.

At the November opening, Ataman called the show “a delayed exhibition,” featuring works that Turkish viewers have not had the opportunity to see on their own turf. Of the 11 pieces in the show, only one, Beggars (2010), is being shown for the first time. The artist characterized his films as deeply concerned with identity, particularly how its personal, group and national manifestations overlap. The exhibition was conceived, he said, as a response to his past mistreatment, a flouting of constraints, now that they have been relaxed. Despite this note of resentment, his tone was more celebratory than vindictive. He spoke with particular warmth about the earliest work in the exhibition, Women Who Wear Wigs, which debuted at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and has since acquired unanticipated cultural significance. In 2008, Erdogan attempted to legislate a change that would allow women to wear the Islamic headscarf in Turkish universities. The ban was reinstated a few months later on constitutional grounds, following protests from the secularist establishment. The recent heated debate in France about forbidding the burka in public has given Ataman’s installation a further topical dimension.

On each of its four adjacent screens, Women Who Wear Wigs presents a Turkish woman describing her reasons for wearing a wig. One has cancer and is losing her hair to chemotherapy; another is a prostitute donning a flamboyant blond wig over her natural dark hair; the third is a Muslim college student, obscured by darkness, who has taken to wearing a wig as an alternative to the forbidden headscarf; finally, there is a transsexual whose long hair was forcibly cut by the police when she was arrested for prostitution. Ataman remarked that, given the political climate in Turkey a decade ago, these four women could not even have been in the same room together at that time. Bringing the four narratives into artificial juxtaposition, Ataman’s structure coercively poses the possibility of “community.”

Ataman is always resolutely Freudian, seeing personality as the result of our hapless attempts to control our fears and desires. The wigs suggest that identity is less the blossoming of a “true self” than a masquerade, the donning of a persona. If his films imply that an individual’s interpretations of his or her past are the substance of identity itself, they also intimate, conversely, that identity tends to reveal itself most transparently when one is placed under duress, and one’s accustomed self-image begins to crumble. Ataman seems poised between a belief in the Wittgensteinian autonomy of language and a sense that there may be—or we may have a desire for—some deeper-lying subjectivity beyond one’s web of words, the chance that inner truths are revealed when our control over our own language falters. This hidden story is synonymous with Freud’s “forgotten material” that can be brought to light only inadvertently.

Women Who Wear Wigs is a meditation on the consequences of perceptual overload, both the viewer’s and the subjects’. The four women speak simultaneously about their respective crises, as though competing with each other to hold our attention. Does the predicament of the woman with cancer—or rather her performance of it—make the transsexual’s sufferings appear self-indulgent, or equally severe and undeserved? Using a pluralistic structure, Ataman posits “community” as an arena in which the individual’s “fantasy” is forced to fight it out with the self-projections to earn credibility. The viewer is cast as an arbiter, judging which stories are the most convincing.