Kutlug Ataman: Küba
March - May 2005
The Sorting Office, New Oxford Street, London and also Pittsburgh, Preston, Stuttgart, Vienna, Sydney, Newcastle, Southampton and Istanbul
“I was the original founder. There was no one here. Yes. I began it. We built a shack, by morning we’d finished the walls and put in windows and a door. We had no concrete. We used mud. There was no water here. They brought oil-drums of water at night. No one noticed it for three or four months. Then they came and caught us. … There are three hundred thirty-two, three hundred thirty-three houses. They named this place Küba.” (Bahri, Küba founder and resident)
The area known as Küba first emerged in the late 1960s as a neighbourhood of safe houses in a dangerous time. In today’s Istanbul, few people could tell you exactly where it is: some say Küba lies in the southern part of the city, close to the airport, while others doubt whether it still exists. Actually, it comprises a few hundred makeshift clapboard dwellings that are still home to non-conformists of diverse ethnicity, religion and political persuasion united in their defiant disregard for state control.
Kutlug Ataman, who describes Küba as “first and foremost a state of mind” has spent more than two years immersing himself in the life of its residents, mapping its physical and psychological territory through the lives of forty inhabitants in forty individual DVD portraits. Initially uprooted in October 2004, these disembodied residents of Küba first appeared in Pittsburgh, where Ataman’s multiple DVD installation – a commission for Artangel – won the prestigious Carnegie Prize.
In March 2005, Küba’s community took up temporary residence in what had once been London’s largest Royal Mail sorting office, a 272,500 sq.ft, nine-storey building on New Oxford Street. They told their stories through forty domestic television sets of varying shapes and sizes. Then, during May and June, they were temporarily relocated to other homes in London: the Salvation Army HQ, Wormwood Scrubs, Ealing film studios, the Great Eastern Hotel, Access Self Storage in Kings Cross, Oxfam in Hackney, Lister Community School in West Ham, Ritzy Cinema, Amnesty International Head Office and the Artangel offices in Clerkenwell. Following this their journey would take them to Stuttgart, Vienna and Sydney, before concluding back in Istanbul in 2006.
Küba was also available as a 176pp full-colour, velvet-bound photo-album with an introduction by Bill Horrigan, Curator, Media Arts, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio and extracts from the testimonies of all forty Küba residents. The Küba book, now sold out, took the form of a family photo album, commemorating these DVD portraits using stills and edited transcripts.
This project was supported by Arts Council England, The Artangel International Circle, Special Angels and The Company of Angels
