KUTLUĞ ATAMAN’IN YAPITLARINDA KİMLİĞİN TEMSİLİ
REPRESENTATION OF IDENTITY IN THE WORKS BY KUTLUG ATAMAN

Summary/Abstract: Kutluğ Ataman who has had his education on history of the cinema and theories of film and documentary discusses the fact of identity within the context of otherness and the body and gender policies in his video installations that he has been performing since 1998. Ataman makes films about reality in the presentation of reality, not reality itself. In his work, Kutluğ Ataman emphasizes uncertain and versatile nature of reality through the diversity of the models he chose from the real life, and of their conceptions about the world and themselves. According to him, identities that are reproducible are also changeable. The artist has not focused on a particular type of identity. Instead, he has paned his camera to contrarian people living in the edge of the society. Those people who are mostly women reconstruct their identities while telling their own stories in front of his camera. Ataman has included the make-up and dressing periods of his subjects in “Semiha B. Unplugged” and “Never My Soul (Ruhuma Asla)” and in this way, he has made this an inseparable part of the story. While four different women in collocated four displays are talking about wigs to change and rebuild their identities under pressure in “Women Who Wear Wigs (Peruk Takan Kadınlar)”, Ataman draws attention to the strict policies of identity in Turkey in the big picture consisting of these displays. Within the scope of this research, works by Kutluğ Ataman have been analyzed in the context of body, identity and sexuality. The artist’s approach and technique in his works have been pointed out and, video installations such as “Semiha B. Unplugged”, “Never My Soul (Ruhuma Asla)”, “Women Who Wear Wigs (Peruk Takan Kadınlar)”, “1+1 (Bir artı Bir)”, and “Küba” have been analyzed.

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