Audio Transcript: Kutlug Ataman

Here’s Kutlug Ataman talking about Twelve, this six-screen video work. All the films are interviews with people from an Arab community near Turkey’s border with Syria. They believe that they have been reincarnated and they talk about their present and past lives.

“They remember what happened to them for two reasons: one is that they had violent deaths and two, because when they were children, when they remembered things, this was not oppressed by their parents and they didn’t repress their memories. And they started remembering how they died, what happened to them after they died and how they were reborn.

They also talk about how they went and found their relatives from their previous lives and how they convinced them that they were their dead relative.

I framed them vertically – in the identity-photo mode – because I think this piece is also about identity, how we fabricate our identity in everyday life. You see that these people have double identities therefore you start thinking, I think, that identity is something we fabricate, that we actually make.

That was one of the reasons that I did vertical screens but I also thought afterwards that in a completely dark room they appear like doors into other realities. And in the old Middle Eastern fashion I wanted to have these storytellers sitting around, like these frames, and then you have these stools sitting around and listening to these tales.”