Kutlug Ataman y las memorias visuales como espacio de enunciación

Laburpena

The literary genre known as Memories is a type of book or written story in which the author narrates his own life or occurrences in it, including impressions, experiences and feelings that are significant to the author. As if they were visual memories, in the video installation Twelve (2003) the contemporary Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman (Istanbul, 1961) hits us with his intimate stories of marginalized and oppressed characters who relate repeatedly their subjective stories, revised by the artistic device itself.  They believe in reincarnation and so they literally feel to be living their "second life", by combining two different realities from two different life stories into one.   In the context of socio-cultural transformation shaped by the Turkish modernization - held so drastically and dichotomous that generated a conflict between the ancient and the modern, between East and West, between globalization and local cultures-, Ataman reflects about subjectivity, cultural identity and ways to give meaning to life in a community constantly facing war and death, regardless of the fact that, in this case, the re-invention of identities reaches a metaphysics or mystic form.   Through Twelve and other Ataman’s works we will examine how alternative forms of memory are visualized by some contemporary artistic practices as spaces of subjective enunciation and cultural difference, and how they contribute to the subjective work and the construction of the identity -either personal or collective. Those identities are related to a narrative, they are the memory and identification of certain social imaginaries, which condense identifications with previous generations. We will also explore how a community organizes his imaginary to cope with the ups and downs of a particular regional political situation, amalgamating the context with the religious beliefs in order to recover and give sense to the terrible losses suffered, making use of the Memories.