THE PORTRAIT OF SAKIP SABANCI

Kutluğ Ataman
Born in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1961.
He lives and works in London, UK, and Istanbul.

In 1980, Kutluğ Ataman, then only a young arts student in Istanbul, was imprisoned after filming the local street protests preceding Turkey’s military coup d’état. After his release, Ataman relocated to the United States, where he studied film at the University of California, Los Angeles, and attained early acclaim as a documentary and feature filmmaker. Ataman’s earliest video and film installations explore the struggles of individuals in marginal communities to script their own identities. In many of these works, Turkey is thrown into relief as a departure point to examine how individual expression becomes seamed in by prescribed narratives of sexual and national identity. More recently Ataman’s works have shifted from personal stories to the story of history writ large, focusing on history and geography as artificial constructs. Running as a thread throughout his videos and films is the way in which agency is created and divulged in choosing how one tells one’s stories.
Identity, under Ataman’s lens, is something malleable— something to be molded, stretched, or disguised—if only ever partial or incomplete. His beautifully spare films and videos focus on the capacity of speech to act simultaneously as a vehicle for self-expression and self-delusion. The camera frequently trains on a single individual, homing in on his or her cadence of voice, subtle gestures, and fleeting facial expressions in works that chart the convulsions of selfhood and the lies people tell themselves and others to define not simply who they are, but who they want to be. Ataman’s newest installation Sakıp Sabancı (2014) is an homage to the Turkish business magnate and philanthropist who passed away in 2004. It is composed of nearly 10,000 LCD panels, each comprising a passport-sized portrait of someone who once knew Sabancı or whose life was impacted by his good works. The configuration of the panels is never stable; rather, the installation adapts to the space it inhabits. Suspended from the ceiling in an undulating wave, the overpowering swell of images of individuals whose lives Sabancı touched become the collective portrait of a man who loomed larger than life.