Art and documentary

'I don't make documentaries,' says Kutlug Ataman. 'I make extremely objective pieces about very subjective people. Documentary, by its nature, promises the truth. It establishes a first-degree relationship with its subject, and assumes that its viewer should establish a first-degree relationship with its premise. I don't promise the truth. I suspect any claim that does.

'Nowadays, what we call "documentary" is reduced to television. When you approach any station to make a documentary, you are asked what the synopsis is. This means that even before starting to make the film, you have to come up with a description of the reality you promise to present. In other words, one is expected to come up with an accurate description of how one is going to fictionalise reality, the world we live in, even before one goes out with the camera and works on that reality. Look at the coverage of the war on TV. It feels like even the news reporters (more like news makers) are acting more like theatre directors.

'What we consume as reality on TV, in the media and pretty much everywhere else, operates in fact like fiction. Real people are presented as characters (look for instance at the depiction of the entire Muslim and Arab world as the mini-clones of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden).

'As an artist, I am interested in establishing a once-removed relationship with my subjects and in how they construct their stories on the screen, solely by talking, so the mechanism of this creation — namely how we make fictive characters of ourselves — can be revealed to the viewer. I am interested in revealing the mechanics of the spectacle and how reality is constructed rather than in the illusion of reality created by the spectacle itself.

'Any artistic creation has to call for intellectual reading. Art, to me, is not for example a beautiful object. That is craft. It becomes art when it is about beauty. This is why it is more appropriate for me to present my work in the museum space, instead of a cinema salon or TV, where products are offered to be consumed like a Big Mac rather than create new meanings that further our lives and, if I can permit myself a little dose of pretension, our civilisations.'

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Extensions of the artist

Ataman's subjects may strike the viewer as eccentric, on the margins of 'normal' society. But the artist rejects such characterisations. 'I am not capable of understanding this issue of "margins of society"', he says. 'Who decides who will take which position in the society? Are the seats in society numbered and no one told me about this? As far as I am concerned, everyone is in the centre of the society, because society takes place around us individuals. We are all surrounded by it. There are as many centres as there are individuals. So this idea of being described as on the periphery of your own life just because you are a transvestite or a thief is absurd.

'Is this a class question? Is it purely economics? Or morality? Who decides the parameters within which we are to judge who is to sit where? Is the Queen on the margins of the society then? After all, there is only one Queen, and it is a rather unusual occupation to have in this day and age. I don't think so. As a human being, she should have the right to be in the centre of the society just like any one of us does. We ought to realise that this model of centre versus periphery is archaic and rather dysfunctional in an advanced society. We are all educated people, so it is shameful to live using templates that we know are wrong and problematic.

'As for me, I perceive my subjects as my own extensions. In many ways, they reflect my own obsessions, preoccupations and problems. Take for instance Veronica Read. I met her because of my own collection of hippeastrum bulbs, and not originally with the intention to make a piece with her. I do not feel entitled to make documentaries about other people. Moreover I feel a great deal of suspicion toward people who do. I feel that I can only speak about myself. So I go out and find the likes of me, and reveal in them my own reflection, which is the only side of them I feel I can allow myself to show, because I would be concerned if I found myself having to present the sides of them that I don't know well enough. And I don't think I can know well enough unless it is me. Even then, it takes a lifetime for one to discover who one's self is — if one does at all.'

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'When a painter paints a subject, in fact he is not painting the subject but his own perception of that subject, which then becomes that subject's identity, established as objective reality, whereas it is in fact very subjective. Every portrait, be it art or documentary, cannot escape this. So it is wrong for artists to claim that they paint the world. In fact, artists paint themselves, because they paint their own perception of the world.

'I am not interested in this kind of first-degree relationship with any of my subjects. I am not a painter or a documentary maker. My relationship with my subject has to be once removed, so I can reveal the very mechanism of the painting process itself, so to speak. For example, in Women Who Wear Wigs I approached four subjects who were in fact extensions of myself, so I could show I was painting myself through them. It consists of four screens, each containing the narrative of one woman and her relationship with her wig, but all four screens together form a larger single screen (divided in four if you like), which I call the fifth screen, which is my self-portrait.

'The first woman was falsely accused of being a terrorist after a military coup in Turkey, which was very similar to my own experience in Turkey after the 1980 military coup, which saw some 300,000 people jailed and tortured, and many people hanged with possibly false evidence obtained through torture. The generals have not been tried to this date and this lack of basic justice in Turkish society is a cancerous problem disturbing our conscience, including my own. This woman was able to alter her identity using a wig and, unlike myself, was able to escape torture and unlawful detention.

'The second woman had cancer. The cancer attacked her breast and the ensuing chemotherapy attacked her hair. As a result she used a wig to maintain her identity. I felt close to her experience because I think I have also a very resilient nature. I identified with her fight, with her feisty and confrontational nature, because I am very much like that myself. I also understood one's physical being attacked due to the fact that my own life was threatened in Turkey because of political dissent. After all, what is the difference between a disease that attacks you and a state that wants to destroy you? In both cases you are up against forces that you cannot control, and it is a very scary experience. In both cases you have only yourself who can help.

'The third woman was prevented from going to university because she wore a religious headscarf, which is illegal in Turkey, as it is in France. Once again, authority telling you how to behave, who to become. So she wore a wig in order to cover her natural hair and went to school, embarrassing the professors, who act more like policemen than teachers.

'The fourth woman was a transsexual prostitute. The police kept shaving her head in order to prevent her from going to the street, because, well, she didn't really look like a woman. So she wore a wig. Now, I am gay, and I know all about this kind of treatment in Turkey, so there you go — I could not help seeing myself in her.

'This is how I put these four women together, and showed how they fought back, established and asserted their own true identities by using the simple device of wig. When I see this piece projected, unlike the audience I don't see four screens. I see just one divided in four, and that is the picture of me. So yes, I see a relation between my work and the tradition of painting self-portraits.

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Form, illusion and reality

Many of Ataman's video works involve multi-screen projections. What is the thinking behind this? 'Multiple screens came up as my preoccupation with how we construct reality evolved from one work to the next. In Women Who Wear Wigs, the four screens give the audience the chance to oscillate/switch between scenes, so each viewer has the freedom to choose and construct for themselves a story which is uniquely their own. In other words, it allows them to edit for themselves, so they are aware of the mechanism of how the illusion of reality is constructed.

'In The Four Seasons of Veronica Read, for example, where the subject is trapped in the yearly cycle of the bulbs' existence, to which she subjugates herself, the narrative loses its beginning and end and forms a circle. So the screens are in a square formation and you access the story by going around it, inside the cube. Again, this was like Women Who Wear Wigs, but in three dimensions, and it seemed appropriate when the subject-matter was obsession, because the subject was trapped in her own narrative, like we all are in our lives. These are the kinds of freedoms I have in the gallery space which I would not have was I to present these works in single screens.'

Some of Ataman's works have a very long running time — in particular, the single-screen, 465-minute-long kutlug ataman's semiha b unplugged. So presumably the viewer is not expected to watch the entire film at one sitting? 'This was the first piece I created,' Ataman explains, 'before I thought of using multiple screens, such as in Women Who Wear Wigs, which was the piece immediately following it. I had the same intention as in Women Who Wear Wigs, but I was trying to achieve it in a different way.

'semiha b is the re-enactment of an entire life. It is highly subjective. If you are careful, you start suspecting whether what you see is real or being constructed. A lot of the curators who saw this piece initially took it for its face value, because they were Westerners coming to Turkey and did not expect to meet a woman like Semiha in a Muslim society. They were fascinated and could not initially establish an intellectual relationship with the piece. On the contrary, they idolised her and were fascinated by her, which was rather anti-intellectual. For me, the main point of the piece is its length. It does not allow one to access the entire story. It is a physical impossibility. So you dip in and out and form your own impression of a life, but never the entire picture. As in Women Who Wear Wigs, it is implied that one has to do one's own editing and walk out with one's own version of reality, which will be unique.'