Kutlug Ataman’s “Mesopotamian Dramaturgies/Journey to the Moon,” a single-channel video in which a voice-over describes a sequence of photographs.Credit Yosuke Kojima
"The Turkish filmmaker Kutlug Ataman’s “Mesopotamian Dramaturgies/Journey to the Moon” is a single-channel video in which a voice-over describes a sequence of mostly black-and-white photographs. It tells the story, at once hopeful and cynical in a magical realist sort of way, of a small town in 1950s Turkey, its collective imagination sparked by a politician’s speech, trying to send a minaret to space with balloons. The implicit question is, “Are any of us really capable of democracy?” A dozen acrylic and graphite drawings of birds by Sutapa Biswas, accompanied by her video “Magnesium Bird,” make for a piquant counterweight."
