Kutlug Ataman’s Paradise and Küba: Utopias a world apart in Vancouver
Kutlug Ataman Paradise 2007 Installation view Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery New York
The Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman has brought two large-scale video installations to Vancouver for a show that measures two communities a world apart. In Paradise, co-commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Ataman shows interviews with 24 Southern California residents who speak to living in the place they call “paradise.” Filmed in wide-screen format in Orange County, a place familiar from television series such as The O.C. and Laguna Beach, Ataman presents large-scale, colour-saturated videos of a unique group of individuals that includes a young girl who dreams of being star, a founder of the first drive-in church and members of the Laguna Beach laughter yoga club.
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Kutlug Ataman Paradise 2007 Video still detail Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery New York |
The work is paired with Ataman’s 2004 Carnegie Prize-winning video installation Küba, which offers the images and voices of 40 people who live in an Istanbul suburb once known for its safe houses for leftist Turkish Kurds. Together these works offer contrasting notions of utopia. Ataman says, “Just as Küba is not really about the neighbourhood in Istanbul but the complex structures and dynamics that construct its narration, its mythology, Paradise is not about California, or Californians but about the workings of the same narrative structures. Just as Küba is a gated community, so is Paradise; it doesn’t matter if the gate is locked from the inside or outside.”
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Kutlug Ataman Küba 2004 Installation view Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery New York / Photo Christopher Bliss |
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