Introducing Ahmet Ögüt

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Öğűt unfolds in the civics lesson he calls “Mutual Issues, Inventive Acts” (2008). In this series of photographs and drawings, we see people in different cities deploying uncommon means to get by: a man straps his feet to two stools to cross a flooded street; two women share a long winter scarf as a communal act that satisfies need; another man, perched on a little motorbike with a big sack on his lap, moves without the help of a moving van—all improvisations that engage the ludic imagination to make the hardships of daily life manageable, even amusing.

In Öğűt’s inevitable logic of play, ironic meaning can be taken to the point of material literalism. In his recent Ground Control (2008), created for this year’s Berlin Biennial, the symbolic weight of the piece is embedded in its material: 

Öğűt paved a tar road from the street into the entry gallery of the KW Institute. The power of the Everyman, presumed to have been subsumed by the power of privilege, is playfully returned by Öğűt’s rerouted access road. Dislocation and relocation, improvisation and rehabilitation, absurdity and the regeneration of community are all here—in other words, the themes and strategies that have quickly become Ögüt’s signatures.

This is where Öğűt’s work apparently likes to land—on a border where many artists who live in repressive places find themselves, whether Franz Kafka, Komar & Melamid, or Milan Kundera. In Öğűt’s hands, irony is the craft of defiance with a comic face. His goal is to rebalance the idea of power, replacing submission with the possibility of personal rights, relocating sovereignty in the individual to legitimate his or her own relationships in the realms of private life and the polis. “What makes me interested is the political background,” Öğűt says. “But the possibility of someone else’s political background is just as important. Things look different from different places. It’s like me. I’m living in the European Union now, but I’m Turkish. The pain of where I come from doesn’t go away for me because I’m in Amsterdam. It’s strange what happens with geography—one hundred meters apart the world can be totally different. It’s mysterious, it’s a joke, it’s a tragedy. That’s what I want in the work, these different levels that make possibilities appear.” 

Ahmet Öğűt’s work is on view through Oct. 12 at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona, and through November at the Guangzhou Triennial, the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, and Index, Stockholm.
  "Introducing Ahmed Ögüt’" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents.