Kutluğ Ataman: ‘I Am a Storyteller. But Is Story Everything?’

As the artist prepares to present his 22‑year‑old work Küba at Art Basel Paris, he talks about its continuing influence, changing reception and the mythology of the community it depicts. 

During the early 2000s, Turkish artist and filmmaker Kutluğ Ataman spent two years filming in a small neighbourhood in western Istanbul. Not in the working-class tower blocks, but in a shantytown wedged between them: a huddle of makeshift shacks which, when Ataman visited, covered an area equivalent to two football fields. Küba, as it was referred to by its inhabitants, was formed in the late 1960s, following an influx of low-income workers, Kurdish migrants and left-wing militants.   

Küba’s architectural structure is not clear from watching Ataman’s video installation Küba (2004). Instead, the work centres the faces and stories of the community’s inhabitants, underscoring the artist’s assessment that Küba “is first and foremost a state of mind”. Inhabitants young and old share their stories and memories of Küba, along with their hopes and frustrations about the place they call home. “They envied the love and respect we had for another,” a young man called Arif explains. “In those days, this was a very tight community. Outsiders weren’t accepted as they weren’t one of us.”  

Fittingly, when the work is exhibited, the inhabitants’ testimonies are shown simultaneously across 40 cathode-ray domestic television sets—a significant decision, especially for someone trained as a narrative filmmaker, known for feature films such as Lola + Bilidikid from 1999. Since its creation, Küba has been exhibited in a remarkable range of places—including a disused Royal Mail sorting office, a Belgian harbour warehouse and atop a converted container barge travelling up the Danube, garnering new readings in the process. 

During Art Basel Paris, Küba will be shown at the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins, a former repository for cultural artefacts that were threatened with destruction during the French Revolution. Inside this former safe haven, Küba’s stories gain new relevance, especially given that the community itself, as Ataman encountered it in 2004, no longer exists, its residents having largely been evicted following years of redevelopment threats. It is in this light perhaps that the work’s intended commentary on the irreducibility of identity and the impossibility of articulating objective truths comes to the fore.  

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