Aesthetics of self-scaling: parallaxed transregionalism and Kutluğ Ataman's art practice

Abstract

This article examines relations of ethnography, contemporary art practice, globalisation and scalar geopolitics with particular reference to Kutluğ Ataman's artworks. Having been shortlisted for the Turner Prize at the Tate and awarded the prestigious international Carnegie Prize in 2004 with his 40-screen video installation Küba (2004), Ataman became an extremely well-known, globally acclaimed artist and filmmaker. Self-conscious of their global travel and critically attentive to the contemporary ethnographic turn in the visual arts scene, Ataman's video works perform a conscientious failure of representing cultural alterity as indigeneity. Concentrating on the artist's engagement with ethnography, this article consists of three main parts. Analyses of the selection of videos in each part will give an account of different scalar aspects of Ataman's artworks. It will first revisit a previous study (Çakirlar 2011) on the artist's earlier work of video portraits including Never My Soul! (2002) and Women Who Wear Wigs (1999). A detailed discussion of Küba follows, a work that exemplifies a scalar transition in his critical focus – from body and identity to community and geopolitics. The discussion then moves to a brief analysis of the series Mesopotamian Dramaturgies, including the screen-based sculptures Dome (2009), Column (2009), Frame (2009), English as a Second Language (2009) and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (2009). Rather than addressing scale as a differential concept, this article aims to demonstrate the ways in which Ataman's art practice produces self-scaling, self-regioning subjects that unsettle the hierarchical constructions of scale and facilitate a critique of the scalar normativity within the global art world's regionalisms and internationalisms.