About Kutluğ Ataman
Kutluğ Ataman is a film and video maker who lives and works in Istanbul. He studied film in Paris and Los Angeles, and subsequently returned to Istanbul. His work is chiefly documentary in nature, such as Kutluğ Ataman’s Semiha Berksoy unplugged, 1997, in which he presents the legendary opera diva Semiha Berksoy for eight hours. In the 1930s Berksoy was the first Turkish opera diva, who fought her way up as far as the Paris stage, and died in 1997, at the age of 94, with a dozen lives behind her. Ataman’s portrait of Berksoy is not only the occasion for a story about Turkish society, but also just as subtly focuses on the evolution of the Hollywood film and the history of the music hall. Küba is similarly multi-layered and the wide, three-dimensional installation permits one to zoom out from the individual portrait/story to a picture of a whole society.
Ataman is never in search of a truth, and usually turns his camera on people who have stepped out of normal roles to rewrite and reinvent themselves. Recording their testimony is an important procedure in this, because it allows one to catch sight of what a self-image is, and how people deal with it. In 2004 Ataman was nominated for the Turner Prize.
Küba is running simultaneously with the exhibition De-Regulation by Irit Rogoff and Kutluğ Ataman in the MuHKA.