Kutluğ Ataman had two solo exhibitions at Niru Ratnam Gallery from 12 April to 15 May 2022. At Gallery 1, Ataman presents 'Mesopotamian Dramaturgies', part of an ongoing series that reflects on the history and present of the region centred on Eastern Turkey where Ataman is now based, as well as the cultural and geopolitical forces at play there. The central work is a twenty-screen television installation called 'The Stream' (2022) which is the first major new work shown by Ataman since 'The Portrait of Sakip Sabanci' (exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 2015 and The Royal Academy, London in 2016).
In 'The Stream', eight films play across twenty televisions that are suspended on a worn wooden structure. The screens point at various angles, mostly upended, forming a rough pyramid. Across the eight different films the viewer sees a hand-held hoe digging an irrigation stream. Each of the films is a close-up, sometimes right up to the soil, sometimes slightly pulled back so that the viewer can occasionally see the hand of the digger on the hoe. The televisions are positioned so that the stream that is being dug runs upwards from the ground to the ceiling of the gallery. It is possible to hear the sound of the digger's breathing but the main sound is the hoe scraping against the hard ground. It makes a cacophonous chorus across the installation that recalls Ataman's earlier installations, except instead of the human voices of earlier works, we now hear the sound of activity, of re-making and renewal. Ataman says of 'The Stream': " To me it is about reconstructing, rethinking and starting from scratch. I feel it is also about soil and water meeting and creating life, and the struggle that involves such a task. When I was making it though, I was only digging the soil and let the dry soil meet with water so I could turn the barren land into a green garden for myself. It was an attempt to heal myself."
'The Stream' is exhibited with six works from 'Journey To The Moon' (2009), a series set in Erzinean in Anatolia, near to where 'The Stream' was filmed. The series tells the story of four villagers who in make an attempt at space travel in a vehicle fashioned from a minaret. As with much of 'Mesopotamian Dramaturgies' the tension between modernization and tradition is at the heart of these works. The series deliberately blurs the form of the documentary with fiction and speaks of what the curator Nick Aitken described as an "act of both absurdist escape and one of defiant self-empowerment." (Frieze, May 2013). Here, six of the series of 11 photographic works are displayed. The first edition of this series is in the Tate collection.
At Gallery 2, Ataman exhibits 'fiction'. Where 'Mesopotamian Dramaturgies' speaks outward about a place in the world known as the birthplace of civilisation, 'fiction' is an ongoing series that looks inward, to the point where the show might be understood as an expanded self-portrait. 'fiction' deals with the interplay of the self, sexuality, societal prurience and exclusion of what is deemed deviant. The single-screen film ‘Shock Corridor' (2017) that is the focal point of the show, references the 1963 psychological thriller film of the same name directed by Samuel Fuller. Fuller's film was a full-tilt dive into madness, sex, societal power and exclusion, a dystopian B-movie take on 1950s and early 60s America that shocked critics at the time but is now seen as a cult classic In Ataman's film a disembodied wig or a hairpiece dances gently against a black background, the invisible figure behind it exhaling occasionally to blow strands of hair disconcertingly back at the viewer. If the viewer is familiar with earlier Ataman works of disguised single figures lost in some sort of dance or movement, such as 'Turkish Delight' (2007) they might correctly surmise it is the figure of the artist behind the hairpiece.
Four works from the new series 'Kilink' (2022) are exhibited next to it. Again, Ataman references B-movies, this time the late 1960s Turkish film series 'Kilink' where a super-villain in a skeleton suit terrorises the good characters and in particular female characters of the films. Kilink's behaviour towards women, like early James Bond, is unacceptable but in the late 1960s and 1970s there was a huge demand for such B-movies in Turkey, and such behaviour glamourised as masculine. Arguably B-movies were the main medium to learn about sexuality and expected gender roles. The films often would bizarrely mix genre, content and lifting from other international films due to the lack of international copyright, with Kilink himself being a rip-off of an Italian B-movie super-villain. Sexuality was inextricably linked to deviance and danger in these popular films, something beyond the pale to be punished if excessive or not corresponding to hetero-normative ideals.
On the opposite wall, eight works from Ataman's new series 'Other Planets' (2022) are exhibited. This new series, which also includes a major new film, 'Hilal, Feza and Other Planets' which will debut later in 2022, looks at the societal oppression of subject positions deemed other by authorities, Ataman says of this new series: "The subjects of these series are trans individuals who volunteered to come and act the oppression they endured during the ’90s. Trans subjects are one of the leading political forces for human rights and embody the basic right to exist. It came to my mind during the filming that the sequence had a documentary quality since none of them were actors. What started as a sequence for a fictional work became real in my mind, and I was naturally drawn to this situation where artifice was crisscrossing with reality."
The two exhibitions are Ataman's first gallery solo exhibition since he made a public announcement in 2013 that he needed a clean break from his art practice. Up until that point Ataman had enjoyed a stellar art career, featuring in the Venice Biennale (1999), documenta 11 (2002), Sao Pãulo Biennial (2002, 2010), Berlin Biennial (2001), Tate Triennial (2003) and four editions of the Istanbul Biennial. He also won the Carnegie Prize and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize (both 2004). By 2013, however, Ataman decided to turn his back on the art world. He switched his focus towards a more holistic concept of art, culture and environmentalism and a critique of neo-liberalism and global capitalism.
Ataman returns to exhibiting at a time when those issues he explored at the start of the century are more urgent than ever. As Elizabeth Schambelan wrote in Artforum in 2010 on Ataman's mid-career retrospective at Istanbul Modern, "The artist’s grand themes—the heroic nature of self-creation and self-transformation, the fluidity and inherent performativity of gender, sexuality, and personality—are themselves politically sensitive, insofar as they are unabashedly queer."
