Kutlug Ataman: the enemy inside me

Video art has mostly developed over the last 15 years thanks to contemporary-art biennials and it has invented a new territory - that of the middle space between cinema and art – becoming a genre in its own right. Kutlug Ataman, who was born in Turkey in 1961 but spent around 15 years in Los Angeles in close contact with the American film scene, is one of the protagonists of the recent video-art season. Indeed, he was one of the first to explore this new genre. He pursued contemporary art's need to move closer to reality and was fascinated by the view of fiction as a prerogative of the film world, making him one of the pioneers of the "middle ground" invented by video art.

As he himself says: "I want to show that life itself is art, that it is a kind of construction, how in front of the camera everyday constructions can be formed by everyone."

I first saw an Ataman work, Never My Soul, at the Berlin Biennale back in 2001 but it already contained many of the features of his poetic. It is the true story of a transvestite who imitates the life of the Turkish film star Türkan Soray. Never My Soul contains all the seemingly absurd and tragic (e.g. the sequence on dialysis, which the lead character has to undergo regularly) melodrama needed to turn a true story into a fiction-film narrative. That is, Ataman constructs a story by simply describing reality, which takes on the semblance of fiction thanks to the strong distorting force of reality. This is the core essence of Ataman's work, using video to describe events that belong to modern everyday life and showing us that their potential to become fiction, without the films actually turning them into that.

The exhibition curated by Levent Çalikoglu at Istanbul Modern seems like a retrospective and retraces Ataman's work since 1999. Although it lacks some major works such as Kuba and Mesopotamian Dramaturgies, it does feature a number of videos that have marked the artist's career. His 2010 Beggars, already shown at the Saõ Paulo Biennial in Brazil is also presented for the first time in Europe.

The exhibition is the first on this artist in Turkey. While Ataman's work shows us how extremely "cinematographic" reality is, it also addresses many issues, revealing that today's art seems closely bound to the social, cultural and identity issues of our society and, as the artist says, is interested in how each of us establishes narrations for the others, which is sheer ideology. Maurizio Bortolotti, curator