[October 24th 2002]
Interview

Like talking to myself
Kutlug Ataman - Interview
Text and images by Christian Skovbjerg.

Exhibition: Long Streams
October 11th - December 1st 2002

Nikolaj Udstillingsbygning
Nikolaj Plads, 1067 Copenhagen K
Tel. +45 33 93 16 26
Fax +45 33 32 15 74
Open 12-17
public.relations@nikolaj-ccac.dk

Kutlug Ataman: I didn’t change... It is simply a second area for me to be more free and to be able to run away from the contrains of commercial film practice, and off course, every field has their limitations, but I feel more free, or lets say relatively more free in the arts, so that was one of the reasons. And also it’s a totally different medium of expressing myself, there are things I can not do in the conventional film, like working in the third space and dimension.

Your work flirt with the documentary, what seperates it from that and makes it art?

I don’t call my work documentary, it is a comment on documentary. A comment on the film practice. I utilize a lot of the elements of the conventional film making. I look at the machinery, and then I utilize that, I turn it inside out to make aware of how it works or I temp to do it....

In conventional cinema you sit and watch a film and you are totally taken by this illusion. I am not interrested so much or only in that illusion. I am more interrested into how that illusion is created. So inescapely that leads you to look at the machinery, how it works, so this is what I mean by inside out, or showing the behind...

I work with people who talk about their lives, documentaries nowadays is actually more about fiction, it has the format of fiction. You have to introduce characters, real life people as if they were characters and then you have to slowly unfold the story, and then little twists here and there and then you have the resolution. That is the format of the documentary as we know it now...

Extensions of myself

You work with very specific types of people, people who often stands out, outside normality or a broader sense of community.... What do you look for in your subjects and how do you find them?

I see them as my own extensions... So to me they are not people who are outside of the norm, to me there are interesting people who live their life fully. I don’t really seek them out, they come to me naturally, because that how I am too, and then I always look at my own work almost as if it’s autobiographical, so I only work with people whom I have something in common with and have a special contact with. So even if I never meet them before, when we start talking about the subject of the film, we connect, so thats how it works.

It doesnt seem like you have to drag things out of them?

No, I think they feel very conformtabel with me, because they also feel, obviously, as if they are having an internal discourse, in their own minds. So I connect with people with whom I find or discover something very much in common with... and I am not very interested in doing things with other people that I don’t really have this kind of connection with, so they are very personal pieces.

The question of time is very interesting in your work, how are we to approach these unfinished pieces?

I think it steems from the fact that it is extremely difficult to convey reality, that I want to convey that as part of the reality, everything in my work is selfreflexive, nothing stands there functioning, everything is about demonstrating its own function.

Or disfunction?

Well, then it doesn’t really function.

But we rarely see any beginning or end?

It holds together somehow, but the length is also an issue.... there is normally a given kind of formula that you have to make a film for 57 min or 110 min, so I comment on that. And I also make pieces that are not really possible to sit and percieve in one go. That started with Semiha B. Unplugged which is an eight hour long piece so you are bound to have to leave. And then there is Women Who Wear Wigs with four screen talking at the same time and you have to switch and oscillate. Upstairs there is the Four seasons of Veronica Read where you don’t know where it starts and where it ends. And then I kind of want to move away from that with this multimonitor installation called It’s a vicious circle where I have exactely the same image on all monitors, so you are like travelling but the image is the same. I am going into all these possibilities, equations, and experimenting and some of them are working and some of them I say, I dealt with this before, and I let go and go into a new direction.

What now?

To me your new work, 99 Names, seems to be a new direction?

Actually it seems, it looks new, but to me it isn’t entirely... To me there is a narrative in there. I wanted to take it out of any constraints. My last work had four screens and you didn’t know where it started and where it ended, it’s circular, there is no beginning or end to it, the story is constantly turning (The 4 Seasons of Veronica Read).... here I wanted to throw them all.... to me these screens are kind of thrown away....

Into the space?

Yes, thrown into the space and also each one is a step, I don’t want to sound to pedantic but it starts as a slow movement which almost looks like an internal thing, but then the internal evolves into something more violent that can even be sexual, so there is a narrative in it, there is a story, the character evolves, as they say in Hollywood, the character arks, becomes something else. But at the same time in a space it flies, it takes off, which is the liberty I have in the arts. And so it a comment about structure, it’s a comment about space and time, which is in the essence of film and narrative.

It is more an installation than your other more frontal work?

Yes, and....with Veronica I felt I had reached the end of that experiment, that form. Now standing here is It’s a Vicious Circle and this (99 names) and I suspect they will meet again at some point. I don’t know, I can never know this, I can never know in advance what direction it is going to.....

But I am not going to do any new work now for another year.

How come?

I am used to doing work that take about 18 months to two years to bring out and I like this tempo. I don’t want to go fast. I never had an exibition where I showed two (new) works at the same time.

I don’t want them to go out of sink, I like the fact that they go step by step, so there is a chronology, a sense of evolution. And this can confuse now. I think for people that followed my work, they will inevitabel say that 99 Names is the continuation of Martin is Asleep and that It’s a vicious circle is the continuation of Veronica Read, which will imply that there are two directions, but this is not what I am doing.

Yes, this is more about man and the other about women and gays, people who talk. That is true, but it is not so clear for me right now, my work is always about experimentation. I bring it out, I see it for the first time, I didn’t see it yet, then I go home, I will think about it and I change it.

What kind of corrections?

I don’t consider it corrections, they all evolve, I go home and I cut things out. Like Semiha B. Unplugged for instance, I am planning to reuse it now - to do it as a new work, I don’t know yet, but I have this instinct, that I should do it. And Women Who Wear Wigs I never changed, it’s very difficult to find time, but I think about it sometimes. Never my soul was originally a film idea, and then I was able to turn it into an installation and it really worked ... so god knows what will happen, I also have a lot work that I didn’t destroy...

So all your past works (the works of this exhibition) are still open for reuse?

Yes more or less, that is something that frustrates the collectors....

Cultural differences and integration

You moved to London a few years ago and showing The 4 Seasons of Veronica Read at Documenta this summer you turn to work with western people and culture, how did you experience this change from insider to outsider?

Years ago I watched a very funny film called How tasty was my little frenchman. It was about a french antropologist going to the Amazons, yoy know studying the natives... he thought, they are so nice, they do massage and they feed me blabla .. but in fact they were preparing him as good food and they cook him in the end and they eat him, so it was making fun of all these western attitudes of anthropolgy...

And I kind of felt that I was doing something similar when I went to England. I said maybe I should do something with an english subject. But then when I found Veronica, in fact all these barriers were gone. Because as I said before I do things with people whom I feel extremely close to, on even one thing, with Veronica her obsession with flowers, so that was still in the back of my mind, but eventually it totally got erased. So I forgot about this whole cultural switch.

One of your new works — It’s a vicious circle - deals racism, how did you come up with this?

I like doing things that appear to be things other than themselves. With Women Who Wear Wigs I was kind of dictating investigating journalism, with Semiha B. Unplugged I was more or less thinking like I was doing a biopec, and with Never my soul it was suppose to be a melodramatic movie but also porno. With Veronica I pretended that I was doing a gardening program. And with Troy (It’s a Vicious Circle) I said this should be a little like a cooking thing, so I told him only to talk about food, in terms of food, and it was very interesting that although he was talking about food... a lot or almost everything that was coming to surface was race relations in Germany and as a black man his inability to participate in the social proces and become a productive member of the german society and how this was not working.....

He is also one of the characters that are caught — in a way like Veronicas obsession, which is very positive and creates beauty — I think in Troys case he is caught in a discourse that is like a vicious circle, he can’t break.

Is that what you refer to with the titel, that he gets caught in his own vicious circle?

Yes, he is almost talking to himself. He refers to the germans as nazis, but at the same time he knows and he tells them that they aren’t but still there is a tragedy of this. He calls it — it’s a vicious circle - it’s taken from him, his aware of it... (...)

I am still not sure if it should be twelve monitors or six or even a single monitor, maybe it should be called a vicious circle, but maybe it doesn’t need to be a circle. (...) The original one, which is installed in Vienna, is actually twelve monitors (because of space there are only six monitors in the exhibition in Copenhagen) and I like the significance of twelve, as the twelve saints or the twelve imans and the day is divided in twelve and the idea of the circle...

What are the religious aspects in your other new work, 99 Names, the figure seems to grow into some sort of trance?

It is in many religions, including the Sufi sect, this kind of movement growing into trance. For me it was more about like this religious experience being something intellectual but at the same time sexual, so it more like this line from the animal to the intellectual, which then covers the entire human existence. But also, it is called 99 Names, because it’s about a book in the Sufi sect, that defines god in 99 names, some of them very violent, some of them very pacific, some very wise...

Is it 99 concepts or names?

Well, 99 names, which are concepts.... anger, peace, destruction, which then off course is an attemp to make a picture of all human stakes, implying that god is made of human stakes....

Reality through substraction and the synthetic

How do feel about being on the other side of the interview or conversation?

It doesn’t make any difference... of course, when you are directed a microphone or a camera you are trying to be more composed but other than that you are still yourself. It is always good to be approached about my work and to talk about my work, because then different part of your brain works and then you also realize things about your own work, so this is how I treat it, as if I am talking to myself.

Again..?

Yes, exactly.

Is there an element of manipulation or maybe even flirt in your work?

No, not more than we do on an everyday basis. The real manipulation comes after when I am in the editing room... by removing things, I actually ed a lot. Substraction is the key, things get improved, things get created by substracting not by addition, and in my work it has always been substracting things from reality....

Some people describe your work as clear footage?

They don’t know...

You erase the questions in your" films", trying to make yourself invisible.... what other manipulations or substractions do you do?

I even used to do decorations, decorate the scenes.... I call it synthetic, because I think only by achieving the extreme synthetic you can make a comment about the real. Because by pointing the camera at the real, there is no way, by the sheer fact, that you are already holding a camera, that is a machine that synthesizes reality, that makes it synthetic anyway, how can you claim that you are going to talk about reality... You have the camera, you have the lense, you have all this mechanical stuff in front of you... and then you have your own brain, that is totally perceiving in the receiving end of someone elses reality ...but you can only proces that information through what you have lived, so communication can never be, is not meant to be a greater truth..... communication is supposed to be two different experiences meeting, so the attempt to relate to a third person is.... it is obvious that it is not possible, so why pretend. The only people who pretend is commercials and CNN, and both are not real. And especially coming from a totally different geography. And seing how you are being shown... there is a huge fiction in the globe and there are a lot of people who believe this.

It was so funny I was in Vienna the other day and this woman told me — oh, the problem of the kurds, oh the problem of the armenians — all the things that are only in the media, and I am saying this woman knows nothing about Turkey, it is only things she heard from CNN, BBC and New York Times, and it is so bizar that in her country there is a rightwing-neonazi-goverment and yet this is not a problem for her, because CNN didn’t say so... I would rather live in Turkey than Austria right now.... so what I am saying is that it is a little bit strange how people can easily be fooled, so it’s a very dangerous tool, the camera.

You say the real comes out of the synthetic, out of what is not real...

I point at it, I don’t try to make it unreal, I point it and I show my finger...

But what kind of truth is it compared to this illusionary truth?

I show the mechanisms, I don’t show truths, period. I only show the mechanism, my work is not about giving answers, It connects to the imaginations of a lot of people because it talks about very real issues that are dear to all of us, interesting, fascinating, politically or philosophically fascinating, fine... but that is not in the essence of my work....

But you seem to get results that are very personal and seem very real, like small personal truths?

Yes true, but that is not main motivation for me, not the essence of my art practice.