Press coverage
Daily Telegraph, 30 March 2005
The Times, 20 March 2005:
"In a large, deserted post-office sorting room in central London stand 40 aged televisions, testament to the time when such things were known as “brown goods”. They stretch out across the space, each screen filled with a different close-up, the room buzzing with 40 voices as each face tells us the story of their life (there are English subtitles). The stories can take hours to unfold; to hear them all would mean days in this bunker. This is the latest project from Artangel, the group behind Rachel Whiteread’s House and Jeremy Deller’s Battle of Orgreave. It is called Küba." (Stephen Armstrong - read full article)
Art in America, February 2005:
"From a distance, it is difficult to make out individuals, and you have no clue what their stories are. You are merely a confused outsider approaching representations of people who themselves are outsiders.
"Then Ataman's slow magic takes over. All you can do is jump in and sit down and begin to watch one person's story in mid-stream, and then another, and another. Oftentimes the stories are shattering. There's Eda, for instance, whose husband beat her repeatedly and didn't come home to see her when she was giving birth in the hospital. You hear from the young boy Avni, who sometimes fights kids from neighboring districts, and who declares that 'peace of mind' is more important than money, and from Ramazan, who is trying to be a good father and husband but who was falsely accused of robbery, and from the Kurd Musaffer who declares, 'All my life I've struggled against the prohibitions in this country.'" (Gregory Volk)
Frieze, June - August 2005:
"A disused sorting office is an apt location for this work. These 40 interviews are like private letters, opened and archived; smuggled-out stories delineating the vicissitudes of life within the void or lacuna that is Küba. Ataman has carried out an exercise in urban anthropology, simultaneously composing a fantastic example of Andy Warhol’s claim that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. But employing a disused building of this kind is a sign, ultimately, not of communication but of a scrambled signal, of frustrated confessions or indecipherable codes. Küba is both intimate and alienating." (Peter Suchin)
The Daily Telegraph, 30 March 2005:
"Küba is an innovative and brilliant way of grappling with portraiture. When one man moans that the shanty town makes "you forget your humanity", you want to shout back at the screen. Far from it: Ataman's televisions teem with warmth and human life, the narratives are never less than compelling. Sometimes the anxieties expressed can sound prosaic, but out of such universal concerns Ataman has forged a kind of poetry on film." (Alastair Sooke - read full article)