Turkey’s acclaimed video artist Kutlug Ataman explores the themes we use to create the stories of our lives

Turkish artist and filmmaker Kutlu? Ataman is talking about how identity is fabricated and cultural myths are perpetuated. He’s also explaining the origin of the name of his Istanbul studio. Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü translates, in Kafkaesque fashion, as the Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks. It is borrowed from the title of a 1940s Turkish novel that presents an ironic view of government attempts to bring the country into line with western-style modernity, and with western notions of standardization and punctuality.

“The novel talks about this institute whose purpose is to…ensure that every clock [in Turkey] shows the same time,” Ataman says by phone from Istanbul. “But my approach is quite different. My approach is to accept the fact that my geography is capable of creating its own modernity, rather than taking things from the West and then brainlessly trying to apply them to Turkish society.”

Ataman, who is also based in London and Buenos Aires, will be in Vancouver this week to open two multichannel video installations, Küba and Paradise, at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The exhibition runs from Saturday (February 9) through May 19, and will introduce local audiences to an international vision of enormous depth and complexity. Not that he employs this vision to proclaim any absolute truths. “I don’t believe at all in giving any…precooked notions of what is what and who is who,” he says. “I believe in raising more questions than answers.”

His award-winning installation Küba is named for the marginal Istanbul neighbourhood where it was shot. A relatively new area, it originated in the 1960s as a shantytown settled by displaced political outsiders and homeless people. Küba has since developed a strong sense of community despite the many disparate social, religious, and political factions rooted there. The 40-channel video plays on 40 old TV sets, each broadcasting a different Küba resident speaking about his life and neighbourhood.

“It’s a very subjective piece, it’s very long, it’s impossible to watch the whole thing,” Ataman says of the work, whose total running time is 28 hours. “Viewers will just walk through it and expose themselves in varying degrees to these stories…and they will walk out with their own subjective narrative, their own perception of what Küba is.”

A similar narrative approach is evident in Paradise, Ataman’s newest work, jointly commissioned by the VAG and four other art institutions in Europe and the United States. It comprises 24 interviews with residents of Orange County in southern California, running on 24 flat-screen video monitors arranged in two concentric circles. In it, Ataman’s subjects respond to his question about the idea in the work’s title, a kind of heaven on Earth. “I wanted to go to an area that brands itself as paradise,” he says. “I wanted to look at the kind of people who live that dream.” He was also interested in revisiting southern California, where that dream is manufactured for the rest of the world.

Born in Istanbul in 1961, Ataman left Turkey when he was 18 to study film in Los Angeles, earning a BA and an MFA at the University of California. Pursuing a career as a feature filmmaker, he stayed on in L.A., then lived in London, Paris, Berlin, Barcelona, and Buenos Aires before returning to Turkey in 1994. He continues to make features, such as 2005’s 2 Girls and 1999’s Lola and Bilidikid, which have garnered awards and critical acclaim at festivals and art houses around the world. Currently, he’s in the preproduction stage of a two-film project to be shot in eastern Turkey.

Still, since the late 1990s, Ataman has developed an alternative practice as a visual artist whose film and video works have been shown in museums, galleries, and biennials, from Amsterdam to São Paulo to Sydney. “My whole quest in the art world has been to re-look at how narrative is structured and how different elements that are part of a screenplay—for instance, story-building—should be re-questioned and deconstructed,” he says.

“In film, be it independent or commercial, you have to abide by the rules of the industry—you have to abide by the market rules,” he explains. The art world promised him greater freedom from these dictates of commerce, giving him a place where his big, clamorous, and challenging installations could find an appreciative audience.

Early in his art career, Ataman focused his “talking head” pieces on far-flung individuals, including an elderly Turkish opera singer; a British horticulturist; and a shy German collector of moths and butterflies. He observes that they all manufactured an unreal narrative of their lives, a fictional persona that they presented to his camera. “They were wearing their own identity like a vest or a coat or a dress,” he says. While making Küba, he realized that “This construction of identity, this artifice…was being done by a community of people. They were almost like bees in a beehive, talking, talking, talking about their private lives but also about being Küban.”

He was struck by how, without consulting each other, individual Kübans had developed a unified mythology of place and belonging. “I asked them…what it meant for them to belong to this singular identity, being from this neighbourhood…and what they had to give in exchange for what they were gaining,” he recalls.

For Paradise, Ataman arranged to interview a range of personalities, including an elderly clown, a futurist, a televangelist, and members of a laughter yoga group. “I was looking at different dynamics and trying to be as even as possible,” he says, then immediately adds that he doesn’t pretend his is a scientific survey. “I don’t make documentaries.”

He continues: “I was looking at how this notion of branding a certain lifestyle and a certain geographical area is achieved. What are the rules of belonging and what are the rules of exclusion and…again, what is the mythology of it?” Ataman discovered Orange County and Küba were surprisingly similar, like gated communities. “Paradise is exclusive, the doors are locked from inside. In Küba, the doors are locked from outside, because people don’t want them to come out. But nevertheless, they both create their own identities in exactly the same way—by dreaming themselves and mythologizing and giving away some of their freedoms to gain, in exchange, this membership card.”