The Exhibition

Long streams of talk, of monologues, wind their way from Kutluğ Ataman’s video installations demanding to be heard, to be paid attention. They speak of the life experience of subjects so unexpected that they have no category to occupy within conventional social life. Following on from Gilles Deleuze’s notion of “State Philosophy”, of a philosophy that is dependent on cohesion between the subject, their ideas and their contexts, we have been tempted to think of “State Experience”, experience that is bound up by whatever categories the state produces for it such as birth, marriage, army service, citizenship, death and to ‘de-regulate’ this by introducing other categories for experience, less conventional and less restrictive. But we have more in mind than life stories, we also wanted to think about visualising deregulated encounters with places unknown to us such as the Istanbul in which many of Ataman’s subjects live. Stefan Roemer has produced a visual essay of the city that deregulates the touristic experience of the exotic unknown and replaces it with common gestures and partial glances. Between these two cycles we have assembled materials from Istanbul that tell of wedding fantasies and civic fantasies, of film dramas and of entertainments. Everywhere you turn you are being addressed, are told a story, and you?... You in turn might also recount one.