“At last, a comfy seat” is the first line of my notes from May 2005, reacting to Kutlug Ataman’s installation, Küba, which featured numerous small screens each with a baggy armchair. This consideration for his audience’s comfort, matched by his compassion for his subjects, is what attracted me to his work. The austere sharp boxes which many artists and curators favour seemingly assume that getting too comfortable lulls the viewer into feeling they were are in their own home and not a gallery. Ataman turns this around, creating a domestic ambiance that draws the viewer into an intimate space to more closely empathise with the stories of his interviewees. After the restricted lockdown diet of online moving image works it is a joy to return to more immersive gallery installations.

In 2013, Kutlug Ataman, internationally acclaimed, but frustrated and exhausted with artworld hustling, decided to retreat to his parents’ homestead in eastern Turkey to concentrate on farming and innovative animal husbandry architecture. He soon made an unsurprising discovery; your profile as an artist disappears after disengaging from public arena in this way. Despite his remarkable back catalogue, dealers and curators lost interest and exhibition offers dried up. But luckily for his admirers, his extended sabbatical has now ended with an exhibition of new video and photographic work at Niru Ratnam Gallery in London until 15 May 2022. Niru was an engaging presence in the gallery when I met him there last week. His grit is evident from his bold decision to launch his own gallery in the middle of the pandemic. He now represents Ataman and is to be congratulated for his enthusiasm in revitalising such a significant figure in 21st century art.

Although it was seventeen years ago, Ataman’s masterpiece Kuba is etched into my memory. Installed across the cavernous third floor of the derelict Royal Mail Sorting Office on New Oxford Street, under the aegis of Artangel, it was as much a visceral as a visual experience for me and for many others. Entering on the ground floor the distant murmur of a vast crowd was just perceptible. As you ascended the foreboding stairwell the volume increased without any clues as to what what was awaiting you. Reaching the top floor you were met with the uncanny spectacle of twenty five talking heads vying to gain attention for their stories. Diverse ages, genders and ethnicities were represented on humble, old school, cathode ray tube TVs each with a battered armchair on which to view it. This intimate setting was like a personal invitation to listen to their take on their daily lives. What they all had in common was the solidarity of their communal life in the poverty-stricken shanty town, Kuba, on the outskirts of Istanbul. You were facing the gentle rumble of the human struggle to survive. The combination of large scale bombardment of human voices with the ability to focus on specific people hinted at something crucial about way we relate to each other.

In the previous year, Ataman’s work in the 2004 Turner Prize indicated that he was in the vanguard of an emerging artistic movement that dispensed with ego in favour of ceding control to others whose stories were demanding to be heard. A fellow nominee and eventual winner of the Turner Prize, Jeremy Deller, had also exhibited films typical of this more generous approach. I was particularly struck by his decision to hand over key roles to Spanish teenagers in filming a community parade in their town. Artists’ community activism has accelerated in the last two decades to the point where all the Turner Prize nominees in 2021 were worthy collectives with explicit political goals. Critics have begun questioning whether art should be judged by its purpose rather than its content. There is a fine balance to be struck here. I feel that Forensic Architecture whose advocacy is realised through engaging visual works have got it right. Most of the 2021 nominees, with exception of the neurodiverse art collective, Project Artworks, whose film Illuminating the Wilderness has been lauded in an earlier blogpost, seemed to be more interested in social activism than art.

Ataman presents the first part of his exhibition Mesopotamian Dramaturgies in a small first floor room in Soho just off Carnaby Street. Its main focus is a twenty-screen sculptural installation, The Stream (2022), which dominates the room. The flat screen monitors are arranged like shards of glass to form a vertiginous Matterhorn-style peak to create a fragmented 3D polyptych. We are viewing repeated sequences of what appears to be the miraculous emergence of water from the parched, stony soil as it is hacked at by someone with a primitive long-handled adze, a farming tool later adapted as woodworking implement, dating back to the birth of agriculture. We are reminded that Mesopotamia is the cradle of the Neolithic revolution which was fed by the ample waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. As well as the stream emerging into the shallow dug channels we can occasionally glimpse what appears to be a muddy hoof; is it a goat or a calf? No… it is Ataman’s bare foot coated in the wet, ochre, earth. These images of stripped-back, survival technologies are particularly poignant at a time of worldwide crop failures due to climate change, global grain shortages resulting from the Ukraine war and the threat of a nuclear exchange that could bomb civilisation back to the stone age. But perhaps more significant for the artist is the sense that digging in the dirt is a metaphor for his personal regeneration.

Ataman’s farm is located in the part of eastern Turkey where ethnic Armenians were decimated by the genocide of 1915 as a precursor to the establishment of the modern Turkish state. Describing it as a genocide is outlawed under the Turkish penal code which prohibits citizens from “denigration of the government.” The creation and consolidation of foundation myths like this are crucial to mobilising the population and fostering ethno-nationalist fervour as clearly seen in Putin’s anti-nazi narrative of Russian history to justify attacking Ukraine and his criminalising the use of the term “war.” Western democracies are of course not exempt from this kind of myth making as seen in Trump’s “stolen election” and Johnson’s recent speech in Ukraine where he made the outrageous comparison of the EU to a dictatorship from which the U.K has been freed. Brexit nationalism was fuelled by implicitly referencing the WW2 myth of plucky Britain standing alone against the Nazi threat.

The slippery nature of memory and the value of myth making for community solidarity is explored in Ataman’s feature length film Journey To The Moon (2009). The narrator muses at the film’s opening: “Did it really happen or didn’t it? Even if you could find someone to tell the story, it’s as if it didn’t happen.” Shot close to the Armenian border it tells the story of four villagers who dream of escaping rural poverty by converting a minaret into a spacecraft, intercut with academics commenting on issues relevant to the main narrative such as the psychology of space exploration and the sociology of the flight from rural to urban centres in Turkey. Sadly the film is not viewable at the exhibition so you have to be content with a series of stills. Some enticing excerpts are however available online which evidence Ataman’s astute perceptions and his rye sense of humour.

Macho posturing is foregrounded at times of war and has often been an important subject in Turkish moving image art as seen in Zeyno Pekünlü’s takedown of pickup gurus which I reviewed in a blogpost in October 2016. Ataman has always championed the expression of gender identities that conflict with heteronormative expectations and has experienced at first hand the often brutal oppression of the LGBT community in Turkish society. As early as 1999 in the four channel video installation Women Who Wear Wigs he included an interview with the transgender activist Demet Demir recalling their experience of police brutality.

A voluminous, silver grey, feathercut wig fills the screen in a more recent work, Shock Corridor (2017), showing at the gallery’s outpost in Hams Yard. The life-size image is disconcerting as we discern that the invisible wearer behind the wig is facing towards us. The person’s face is veiled by the wig which is intermittently disturbed by their breathing out. In my mind this anonymous but glamorous figure evokes the often overlooked group of transwomen who are reluctant to come out, remaining in the closet and unable to express their authentic selves in public for fear of ridicule, shame or abuse. The increasingly vehement anti-trans attitudes stoked by an bizarre alliance of gender critical feminists and right-wing bigots is not making it any easier for them. For his new film Hilal, Feza and Other Planets to be released in late 2022 , Ataman has recruited an amateur cast of trans women to re-enact incidents of oppression they endured during the ’90s. He says:

“Trans subjects are one of the leading political forces for human rights as they embody the basic right to exist.”

All cultures have their creation myths which provide the justification for the gender binary and heteronormative values. For example in Genesis, Eve’s transgression in picking forbidden fruit consigns Adam to a hard life tilling the soil and she pays for this by yielding to his authority and her role a childbearer in perpetuity. Heteronormative oppression (or what we used to call sex stereotyping and discrimination) ramps up massively during armed conflict as seen in news stories of trans women being refused exit by Ukrainian border guards enforcing the martial law ban on males fleeing the country. Wielding iron-tipped shafts of wood, whether as weapons or tools, has been a symbol of male power since the Neolithic age and it is regrettable that the propensity for violence is still seen as a male prerogative. It is this persistent stereotype that is used to justify the exclusion of trans women from female spaces and pacifist males from seeking refuge from war.