Travel Tip: Art and Archaeology in Belgium
DE-REGULATION with the work of Kutlug Ataman

Film and video installation maker Kutlug Ataman, who studied film in Paris and Los Angeles, was one of the revelations of the last Documenta, was short listed for the Turner Prize in 2004 and with Küba won the prestigious Carnegie prize.

Conceptualizer of the exhibition project Irit Rogoff has been engaged with Atamans video’s and films since 1997. In DE-REGULATION she creates an open field where six of Ataman’s multiple and single screen installations - Never My Soul, Vicious Circle, Twelve, 1 + 1 = 1, Martin is Asleep, and Women Who Wear Wigs – communicate with the visual essay Istanbul – Skin of the City by the German artist Stefan Roemer, a TV-room with Turkish television fragments, an archive of Turkish wedding culture, Turkisch film posters and numerous images of Ataturk. From the six video installations, Twelve was recently acquired by the MuHKA.

Kutlug Ataman: Women Who Wear Wigs, 1999
Photo courtesy of MuHKA, Museum for Contemporary Art, Antwerp

DE-REGULATION is concerned with the de-regulation of experiences, both the ones of the subjects of Ataman’s video installations, and the experience of the exhibition viewer. The materials gathered in the exhibition all acknowledge that the surface of Istanbul is rife with contradictions between modernity and traditionalism, between divergent cultural groups, between conflicting desires and that each layer of this skin is in dialogue with the others. Instead of exotic fantasies about Eastern cultures, we begin the perceive Turkey as a hugely dynamic place of movements; migrants pouring both out of it and into it, radical histories reflecting both inwards and outwards, which is both part of the landscape of Europe as well as the very limit lines of Europe.