Audio Transcript: Art historian Professor Irit Rogoff on Kutlug Ataman

“At first encounter the work of Kutlug Ataman always seems intensely foreign, from elsewhere, about worlds that are not familiar. But once one’s had a chance to interact with the work and spend some time with it, things begin to emerge that are very interesting.

In the framework of a quite mystical-sounding story – which is a story of people dying and being reborn and inhabiting new lives which are in odd proximity to old lives – all of this is actually working not towards any kind of religious mysticism but in fact towards a really odd orchestration of anarchy, in which past wives and present wives, and past mothers and present mothers, kind of merge into one another’s narratives.

And it looks as if it’s very local-specific as if it’s really about Turkey. But when you gain some distance and put all the bits and pieces of the work together in your head what you get is a kind of wild complexity produced about a culture which is normally spoken about in very simple black and white terms.”