Kutlug Ataman Perfect Strangers

This exhibition introduces the work of Kutlug Ataman to Australian audiences for the first time. Internationally acclaimed for his film works in museums, and an independent filmmaker in his own right, Ataman is a leading figure in contemporary art and Turkish cinema.

Ataman’s film works focus on individuals who inhabit the margins of conventional society. Narrative driven and interview-based, they explore the role of film as a medium through which reality and fiction collide. In this world people play out a range of characters and roles, merging real lives with heightened drama and intrigue, and reinventing themselves before the artist’s camera. In Ataman’s works the issue of time is central. Of extended duration (in one case, eight hours), the works are often experienced haphazardly as viewers move in and out of the gallery space. In this sense reality becomes further fragmented as each viewer puts together their own version of the story.

Kutlug Ataman: Perfect Strangers is the artist’s most comprehensive survey exhibition to date. It encompasses works from 1997, when he first began to show film installations within a museum context, to the present day. It presents two key works The Four Seasons of Veronica Read and Stefan’s Room as partner pieces for the first time. In these works we are introduced to Veronica Read and the collection of 900 amaryllis bulbs and plants that crowd her small London flat; and to Stefan Naumann, a passionate collector and world authority on tropical moths. Also on display are parallel stories about four Istanbul women and their wigs; a Jamaican man speaking of his experiences as a foreigner in Berlin; an octogenarian Turkish opera diva reflecting on her life, loves and losses; a beautiful transsexual living in exile in Switzerland; and a Turkish woman speaking in two adjacent screens on the divided state of Cyprus. We are also introduced to six Arab Alevite cit izens of Turkey in the multi-screen work Twelve, in which they recount stories of their past and present lives.

This exhibition also presents Ataman’s powerful forty-screen installation Küba, in a special off-site presentation, a short walk from the MCA in Sydney’s historic Rocks precinct. This major work features interviews with forty residents of the Istanbul shanty-town known as Küba. Not located on any official map, this locale is home to impoverished Turks and Kurds, religious fundamentalists, political dissidents and other disparate individuals who are bound in solidarity by their ‘outsider’ status.

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Kutlug Ataman "Perfect Strangers"