fri 29/03/2024

Kutlug Ataman, Brighton Festival/Thomas Dane Gallery, London | reviews, news & interviews

Kutlug Ataman, Brighton Festival/Thomas Dane Gallery, London

Kutlug Ataman, Brighton Festival/Thomas Dane Gallery, London

Two beguiling film installations by the Turkish artist

One of the highlights of this year’s Brighton Festival, curated largely via web chats and long-distance phone conversations by Aung San Suu Kyi, is Kutlug Ataman’s silent film installation Mesopotamian Dramaturgies. The leading Turkish artist, a favourite of international biennales and arts festivals, has taken over the town’s Old Municipal Market to show two multiple-screen works. And in this vast, disused space, as gloomily dark and dank as it is cavernous, we find the perfect backdrop against which Ataman’s films shine.

Ataman responds to this year’s festival theme, freedom, with a deluge of water. Huge screens are suspended from the high ceiling: one screen, which occupies centre stage, is suspended vertically just above head height like part of a lowered ceiling; others are suspended at normal horizontal angles, whilst images are also projected on to the floor. There is no audio, yet the surrounding ambient sounds feed fortuitously into the work: birds flit across one screen while the piercing cries of gulls can be heard in real-time. The faintly pervasive smell of salt water completes this in-the-round, immersive experience.

Ataman_cuniformIn Mayhem, 2011, the Bosphorus shimmers in an array of colours under different light conditions. Two large split-screens featuring the narrow strip of water that separates Europe and Asia are suspended either end of the space. The first of the diptychs presents a sparkling pixilation of geometric patterns (pictured above). Seemingly abstract forms are superimposed on to the undulating surface of water. These turn out to be the cuneiform script for the words "There is no God but Allah". The second screen is a mirror of the first, so that we see the script reversed, as it is in some Turkish mosques.

At the far end of the space a shifting montage of the Bosphorus (main picture) resembles the differently coloured strips of sand that are commonly packaged in glass as souvenirs: silver, bronze, pale gold, grey-blue, azure, turquoise, greenish-yellow. Taken at different times of the day, this is Impressionism recreated as film and dazzlingly presented as Colour Field painting.

Ataman_mayhem_2The second multi-screen work is Su, 2009 (pictured above), meaning simply water in Turkish. For this Ataman filmed in another Mesopotamia, focusing on the spectacular Iguazu Falls which stretch across the borders of Argentina and Brazil. This, Ataman suggests, is an “alternative promised land”. However, filmed close-up, these rushing, tumbling waters do lose something of their dramatic impact and unique beauty.

One can’t in any narrow or meaningful sense call these works political, but Ataman himself suggests that the transforming force of water provides a fitting metaphor for the Arab Spring (Ataman intends to complete filming for Mesopotamian Dramaturgies in Syria, and was only recently prevented from doing so by the current political instability). Perhaps that’s a little too opportunistic, though the expression of Heraclitus’s doctrine of universal change, as summarised by the Greek philosopher’s famous saying "You cannot step twice into the same stream”, duly springs to mind.

Ataman_womanbeggingA more obviously politically engaged work might be found at London’s Thomas Dane Gallery. Seven mainly black-and-white screens offer a portrait of a beggar on an Istanbul street. Some of these images are static, such as the figure lying under a blanket whose only body part on view is an outstretched hand. It is a disturbing image that distils to a simple visual symbol a sense of utter powerlessness and need. Another shows a woman (pictured right) interacting with the camera, talking distractedly, though we cannot hear what she says, and again enacting the universal gesture of supplication.

We learn with some surprise that these are not documentary images. At least two of the individuals are actors. Which ones? In a way these works remind us a little of the once-popular genre of Spanish painting depicting the destitute. The artifice and elegant framing reinforces this, and one is left questioning how our emotions are similarly manipulated and then confounded.

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