Mending the Breach (excerpt)
With the title ‘Poetic Justice," the latest Istanbul Biennial signaled its interest in reconciling self-expression and politics. For the first time, the exhibition sites included the Byzantine splendor of the Hagia Sophia.
By Eleanor Heartney
"Equally powerful is Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman's video 1 + 1 = 1 (2002). Also choosing to represent larger political forces through a single individual, he focuses on a middle-aged Turkish Cypriot woman who sits at a long table in her living room and recounts childhood memories of ethnic fighting between the Turks and the Greeks. On adjacent walls, Ataman presented two screens showing the woman sitting at a different end of the table. In each screen, speaking in Turkish with English subtitles, she tells different but related stories—how a soldier almost killed her, how her family was moved into a Greek family's recently abandoned house, how her father disappeared. The stories are told at the same time, so that a viewer dependent on the subtitles has to constantly and somewhat confusedly shift between narratives. To a Turkish speaker the effect was probably quite different, as the two voices presumably weave together in a musical litany."