Ahmet Öğüt

Ahmet Öğüt

Works from his oeuvre.

“Ogut’s work is an explication of the rights of the individual and the expression of those rights in the face of the requirements of the state. The consequent struggle to make do and live with a sense of self-will sets into motion what might be called game-life. In game-life, the players improvise a way to assert and confirm their rights as they negotiate the social field of daily existence. In Turkey, under the gaze of the state, Ogut sees the invention of alternative means to live as a game that is as endlessly creative and exhilarating as it is tiring, or dangerous. That risk brings tension, amusement, and gravity to his art, giving it a disarming and often funny charge. His inventions are off-kilter, in keeping with the necessities of the life of repressed and impoverished people reacting to the will to impoverish and the will to subjugate-state policies that leave society in its condition of want.

What Ogut’s pile of dynamite signals is his gamer’s strategy, using a playful format to present the effects of the politicization of life. ‘I use this child’s way of seeing the world,’ he says, ‘so that at first the work doesn’t look so dangerous. It allows you to come a little closer, and then you understand that the stories are not that nice.’ At the Kunsthalle there was, for example, his and Sener Ozmen’s 2004 Coloring Book, in which reversals and perversions of normal situations are drawn with the simplest of outlines, waiting to be cheerily filled in-a woman on the floor with a boy looming above her about to crush her skull, or children watching a couple kiss on television while the parents avert their eyes.” – Steven Henry Madoff for Modern Painters

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