This is the first time a range of works by Ataman have been assembled together in Israel or the region. Having been one of the revelations of the Documenta XI, Ataman went on to win the prestigious Carnegie prize for the 40 screen installation ‘KUBA‘ and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2004. After numerous one person shows across the world, Ataman has opted to work with theorist Irit Rogoff, the exhibition’s curator, on a project that thinks his work through a set of paradigms beyond itself. The challenge for both was to escape the model of a ‘solo’ show which divorces the work of an artist from all that is going on around him, and from the ‘thematic group show’ on the other hand, with its harnessing of work towards one meaning and interpretation.

While Israel and Turkey inhabit an adjoining geographical region, they also inhabit a world of difference. Showing the difference within the seemingly similar or familiar has been one of the important drives of bringing the exhibition to the Herzylia Museum of Contemporary Art. The archives of materials we have assembled for this show, may seem familiar to the Israeli visitor, but refracted through Ataman’s sensibility we begin the see the great ethnic and racial tensions, the anxiety and hostility around sexuality and the immensity of conflict between tradition and modernity that so dominate contemporary Turkish culture and inflect the entire region. As an exhibition De-Regulation aims to ‘make strange’ several viewing experiences; opening up the work of a singular artist to a dialogue with other forms and materials, de-stabilising the relations between an artist and his assumed location or context, imagining the viewer as far more than the consumer of exotic tales from ‘elsewhere’.
Ataman’s work has to do with the de-regulation of experience through introducing figures so marginal, that there is no category or stereotype that can contain them. The dominant language of experience he tackles, is bound by whatever categories the state produces for it such as birth, marriage, army service, citizenship and death. Ataman and his protagonists ‘de-regulate’ this prevalent narrative by introducing other dimensions of experience, less conventional and less restrictive yet oddly accessible to all. Instead of demanding empathy for their hardship, these protagonists offer an autonomous ‘address’; they assume they have something to say, language to say it in and that we have the ability to actually hear them in their full difference, rather than to write them into our, familiar scenarios.

The vibrancy of ‘De-Regulation‘ stems from it’s conceptualization as an exhibition that shifts from being about Ataman’s work to the question of what his work makes possible?. It is rare that a body of artistic work generates a research project in which theorists and other artists can also engage. In this exhibition we have created an open field which collates many materials; a thoughtful visual essay Istanbul – Skin of the City by the German artist and critic Stefan Roemer, Istanbul based theorist Nermin Seybasili has gathered together an archive of wedding culture among the many different ethnic groups in the city, while London based academic and conceptualiser of the exhibition Irit Rogoff has assembled film posters from Turkey’s rich film culture and numerous images of Ataturk, which are a prevalent feature of the Istanbul urban landscape. At each level of this work, the touristic stereotypes of an exotic East are dispelled as the place and its people become more complex and more contemporary. Being ‘de-regulated’ away from a simple view of its location, this body of work can enter into dialogue with other cultures both in the region and further a field.

Less Reading...