In Paradise, co-commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery, Ataman offers a remarkable portrait of 24 Southern Californians who offer insight into living in the place they call “paradise.” For the first time, this work is paired with Ataman’s 2004 Carnegie Prize-winning video installation Küba, an equally powerful portrait of 40 people living on the outskirts of Turkey’s largest metropolis. The exhibition is co-presented by Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad.

“The Vancouver Art Gallery is extremely proud to be one of six leading international arts institutions to collaborate in the creation of Kutlug Ataman’s Paradise,” said Kathleen Bartels, director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. “The Gallery actively seeks opportunities to further the work of outstanding contemporary artists and we are extremely pleased to play a leading role in innovative and ambitious international partnerships such as this.”

Paradise was filmed primarily in Orange County, California, a place that for many is known only through television series such as The O.C. or Laguna Beach. Through popular media, the area has come to represent a certain kind of paradise. In this work, Ataman presents interviews with individuals who live in and contribute to Southern California’s real and imaginary existence. His interview subjects are a unique group, including twelve-year-old Maya Berko, who dreams of being star, Dr. Robert H. Schuller, founder of the first drive-in church and the famed Crystal Cathedral, members of the Laguna Beach laughter yoga club, Southern California’s famous chronicler of the apocalypse, Mike Davis, and Carl Braun, a member of the immigration opposition Minuteman group from San Diego. Together, the 24 personalities create a complex, multi-layered portrait of the region as seen through Ataman’s eyes.

Paradise is installed in two concentric ovals composed of 24 monitors, each featuring a different individual telling their story. Filmed in wide-screen format, the large-scale and colour-saturated videos are suggestive of Hollywood films. With the exception of a central monitor, each interview is audible only through earphones, providing an intimate, one-on-one interaction with each storyteller. Küba’s individual stories are diverse and complex and, together with those presented in Paradise, offer a cacophonous portrait of a community that is at once collective and individual. Küba is an unofficial district of Istanbul that first emerged in the late 1960s as a neighbourhood of safe houses in a dangerous time for leftist Turkish Kurds. Today it remains home to non-conformists of diverse beliefs and persuasions united in their resistance of state control. Introduced to Küba by an acquaintance, Ataman spent more than two years exploring the community and capturing 40 remarkable interviews on video that offer a picture of a very different kind of utopia.

Like Paradise, each individual story in Küba is told on a separate television. However, rather than state-of-the-art flat screen monitors, Küba employs 40 used televisions placed on top of secondhand entertainment units, paired with worn chairs. As well, viewers are not provided with headsets. The audio of each television is allowed to play simultaneously without modification. It is virtually impossible to sit and hear all the stories in a single gallery visit, with the full length of Küba’s 40 narrations coming to twenty-eight hours. As a result, each experience of the installation is unique, as it is reliant on what members of Küba’s community the viewer is introduced to during their visit.

While Küba and Paradise were conceived as individual and distinct works, they share many things. Ataman says, “Just as Küba is not really about the neighbourhood in Istanbul but the complex structures and dynamics that construct its narration, its mythology, Paradise is not about California, or Californians but about the workings of the same narrative structures. Just as Küba is a gated community, so is Paradise; it doesn’t matter if the gate is locked from the inside or outside.” Kutlug Ataman was born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1961. He studied film at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating with a B.A. in 1985 and MFA in 1988. In 2004, Ataman was short-listed for the Turner Prize at the Tate Britain in London and participated in the Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, where he was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Prize for Küba. Ataman now lives and works in Istanbul.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 112-page catalogue with essays by curator Aimee Chang, cultural critic and urban historian Norman Klein, and critical theorist and art historian Irit Rogoff.

Paradise is commissioned by the Vancouver Art Gallery; BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, and Treaty of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands; the Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, England; Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, USA; and the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, USA. Paradise is produced by Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü/The Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks, Istanbul, Turkey. -- www.vanartgallery.bc.ca