Muttering often accompanies Kutluğ Ataman’s work, though usually it comes from the art itself. My first encounter with the Turkish artist and film-maker came with the 1999 video work Women Who Wear Wigs. Four characters told their stories on adjacent screens: a political activist obliged to disguise herself, a trans woman who had suffered abuse from the police, a chemotherapy patient, and a devout Muslim student banned from wearing a headscarf at a secular university. Each spoke insistently. It took effort to tune in and pay attention.
The last major work I saw of Ataman’s – Küba (2004) – was in a warehouse in the Antwerp docks. Each of 40 old TV monitors broadcast an account given by a resident of Küba, one of Istanbul’s many informal, unlicensed neighbourhoods (the structures are known as gecekondu – literally “night built”). Stationed opposite the TV sets, armchairs invited you to sit and listen to individual stories among the hubbub. Bound up in the presentation were ideas about what it meant to focus amid clamour, and to make time to listen in the busy city. There was, implicitly, also a deeper question about why it took an art installation to achieve this.
