The special issue "Revisiting Ethnographic
Turn in Contemporary Arts", edited by Kris Rutten, An van Dienderen and
Ronald Soetaert, has been published in the journal Critical Arts:
South-North Cultural and Media Studies. Cuneyt contributed to the special issue
with an article focusing on documentary video in arts.
Cakirlar, C. "Aesthetics of Self-Scaling:
Parallaxed Transregionalism and Kutluğ Ataman’s Art-Practice", Critical
Arts 27(6), 2013, 684-706.
This article examines relations of ethnography,
contemporary art-practice, globalisation and scalar geopolitics with particular
reference to Kutluğ Ataman’s art-works. Having been shortlisted for the Turner
Prize at the Tate and awarded the prestigious international Carnegie Prize in
2004 with his forty-screen video installation Küba (2004), Ataman became
an extremely well-known, globally acclaimed artist and filmmaker.
Self-conscious of their global travel and critically attentive to the
contemporary ethnographic turn in the visual arts scene, Ataman’s video-works
perform a conscientious failure of representing cultural alterity as
indigeneity. Concentrating on the artist’s engagement with ethnography, this
article contains three main parts. Analyses of the selection of videos in each
part will give an account of different scalar aspects of Ataman’s artworks. It
will first revisit a previous study (Çakirlar 2011) on the artist’s earlier
work of video-portraits including Never My Soul! (2002) and Women Who
Wear Wigs (1999). A detailed discussion of Küba follows, which may
be taken as the ‘hinge-work’ in Ataman’s oeuvre that marks a scalar transition
in his critical focus – from body and identity to community and geopolitics.
The discussion will then move to a brief analysis of the series Mesopotamian
Dramaturgies, including the screen-based sculptures Dome (2009), Column
(2009), Frame (2009), English as a Second Language (2009), and The
Complete Works of William Shakespeare (2009). Rather than addressing scale
as a differential concept, this article aims to demonstrate the ways in which
Ataman’s art-practice produces self-scaling, self-regioning subjects that
unsettle the hierarchical constructions of scale and facilitates a critique of
the scalar normativity within the global art world’s regionalisms and
internationalisms.
To link to this
article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2013.867591
