Kutlug Ataman: Captivating Strangers
February 20, 2005 | Levent OZLER
Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman creates videos in which people reveal their psychological fixations, social grievances, and artistic or spiritual quandaries. His astute installations place the viewer squarely in the midst of these absorbing lives.
These are good days for Kutlug Ataman, a 43-year-old Turkish artist who divides his time between Istanbul, London and elsewhere. He has a new video installation in the Carnegie International, for which he won the Carnegie Prize; he was a finalist for Great Britain's prestigious Turner Prize; he recently presented another impressive video piece at Lehmann Maupin in New York; and he is also preparing for a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney later this year. That's not bad for someone who wasn't even exhibiting visual art per se until 1997, although he had been making experimental and feature films for a while, oftentimes to considerable acclaim.
Ataman and the conceptually minded sculptor Ayse Erkmen are now broadly recognized as the two premier contemporary Turkish artists; like Erkmen, Ataman is one of the few Turkish artists in recent memory to enjoy a robust international reputation. Most of his career, however, has transpired far from his home country, due to the fact that, aside from the acclaimed Istanbul Biennial, Turkey has not developed an arts infr
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