DE-REGULATION

The Exhibition
Long streams of talk, of monologues, wind their way from Kutlug Atamanss 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.

The Materials
Sometimes, not often, works of art drive you on to think beyond them, of issues and problems which they open up. The research project that has developed out of our engagement with Kutlug Ataman’s work is called ‘Istanbul – Skin of the City’ and it includes many materials; a stranger’s photographic cycle of the city of Istanbul by Stefan Roemer, an archive of wedding cultures throughout Turkey assembled by Nermin Saybasili (for MuHKA installation, 2006), a collection of photos of Ataturk gathered by Irit Rogoff, many hours of TV from Istanbul recorded by Ataman, books and magazines, some on our website, we have all encountered on the way. The works of art have made us work and in turn that work has been put forward not as a context but as a set of membranes which wrap around the video installations and complicate our relations to them. You might think that all these materials make this an exhibition about Turkey or Istanbul but it isn’t really, it’s about all of us and how we encounter difference and strangeness.

http://www.de-regulation.org/