Kutluğ Ataman
° 1961
Born in Istanbul (TR), lives in Istanbul (TR).
Kutluğ Ataman studied film at UCLA in Los Angeles and emerged as a filmmaker in the mid-1990s. His feature films include Serpent’s Tale (1994), Lola+Bilidikid (1998), 2 Girls (2005) and Journey to the Moon (2009). They play with the traditions of documentary cinema, the interview film and the melodrama, a genre of great importance for Turkish cinema, not least during its very prolific 1970s. In 1997 Ataman was invited to participate in the 5th Istanbul Biennial, where he presented kutluğ ataman’s semiha b. unplugged, an eight-hour documentary about Turkey’s first opera singer, Semiha Berksoy, who was also a painter. Her rambling (and melodramatic) monologue was Ataman’s breakthrough as a visual artist, also internationally. Today, after his prominent participation in Documenta 11 in 2002, he is one of the leading artists working with narrative video installations. In 2006 M HKA organised De-Regulation, a monographic exhibition of Ataman’s work, in close collaboration with theoretician Irit Rogoff. In connection with this ambitious exhibition, M HKA acquired the large-scale video installation Twelve (2003).
