AHMET ÖĞGÜT
FORWARD!
curated by Nick Aikens and Annie Fletcher
Van Abbemuseum
Bilderdijklaan 10 - Eindhoven
7/3/2015 - 14/6/2015
In the Spring of 2015 the Van Abbemuseum will host Kurdish artist Ahmet Öğüt (Turkey 1981). Forward! will be his most ambitious exhibition to date. It will include a number of large-scale installations that will occupy the ten galleries of the museum’s old building but will also spill out, beyond its walls, in surprising and captivating ways.
Öğüt’s output over the past ten years has been dauntingly prolific. It spans video, gallery-based installations, site-specific sculptures or long-term pedagogical programmes. Öğüt’s practice, which always responds to a specific socio-political context (often, but less and less restricted to, his native Turkey or the Netherlands where he has been based for the past several years) and which deploys the poetic to the pedagogical makes a case for the necessity of speaking to politics through art in multivalent forms. Öğüt has constantly sought to engage audiences and debates outside the field of art, understanding that artistic thinking can be best deployed when it steps outside its own frames of reference. Other facets of Öğüt’s practice draw on metaphors, reenactments or interventions that show a more playful approach to the subjects, histories and contexts he wishes to address.
In the exhibition viewers will be invited to navigate their way through a series of installations, images and encounters where different artistic strategies and stories are presented. These emerge in the way Öğüt’s uses his own artistic persona or through the evocation of different histories and their relevance to society today. In all of them the artist’s interventions invites us to think about art’s role in questioning and un-settling accepted givens, and make us a look at the world afresh. As such, Öğüt’s approach sits with one of the Van Abbemuseum’s core beliefs that art has the capacity to make us ‘imagine the world otherwise’.
Ahmet Öğüt was born in in Diyarbakir, Turkey in 1981 and studied at the Hacettepe University en the Yildiz Technical University. From 2007 to 2008 he studied at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. His work has been included all over the world including the biennales of Venice (2009), Berlin (2008), Santa Fe (2008), Thessaloniki (2007) and Istanbul (2005). His practice captures the imagination in unique ways, tackling complex political and economic themes with a lightness of touch. For example, in 2008 he presented Ground Control at the Berlin Biennale, where he covered the whole of the ground floor of the Kunst- Werke with asphalt. In Turkey, asphalt laying was a means of homogenizing the country in its rapid quest to modernize, metaphorically covering over some of its diverse history in the process. Recalling conceptual practices of the 1960s the work also critiques the institutions and its potential to flatten ideas, concepts or histories. Ground Control will be recreated in the final room of Forward!
Image: Ahmet Öğüt, Forward! Design: Collective Works, Peter Zuiderwijk.
FORWARD!
curated by Nick Aikens and Annie Fletcher
Van Abbemuseum
Bilderdijklaan 10 - Eindhoven
7/3/2015 - 14/6/2015
In the Spring of 2015 the Van Abbemuseum will host Kurdish artist Ahmet Öğüt (Turkey 1981). Forward! will be his most ambitious exhibition to date. It will include a number of large-scale installations that will occupy the ten galleries of the museum’s old building but will also spill out, beyond its walls, in surprising and captivating ways.
Öğüt’s output over the past ten years has been dauntingly prolific. It spans video, gallery-based installations, site-specific sculptures or long-term pedagogical programmes. Öğüt’s practice, which always responds to a specific socio-political context (often, but less and less restricted to, his native Turkey or the Netherlands where he has been based for the past several years) and which deploys the poetic to the pedagogical makes a case for the necessity of speaking to politics through art in multivalent forms. Öğüt has constantly sought to engage audiences and debates outside the field of art, understanding that artistic thinking can be best deployed when it steps outside its own frames of reference. Other facets of Öğüt’s practice draw on metaphors, reenactments or interventions that show a more playful approach to the subjects, histories and contexts he wishes to address.
In the exhibition viewers will be invited to navigate their way through a series of installations, images and encounters where different artistic strategies and stories are presented. These emerge in the way Öğüt’s uses his own artistic persona or through the evocation of different histories and their relevance to society today. In all of them the artist’s interventions invites us to think about art’s role in questioning and un-settling accepted givens, and make us a look at the world afresh. As such, Öğüt’s approach sits with one of the Van Abbemuseum’s core beliefs that art has the capacity to make us ‘imagine the world otherwise’.
Ahmet Öğüt was born in in Diyarbakir, Turkey in 1981 and studied at the Hacettepe University en the Yildiz Technical University. From 2007 to 2008 he studied at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. His work has been included all over the world including the biennales of Venice (2009), Berlin (2008), Santa Fe (2008), Thessaloniki (2007) and Istanbul (2005). His practice captures the imagination in unique ways, tackling complex political and economic themes with a lightness of touch. For example, in 2008 he presented Ground Control at the Berlin Biennale, where he covered the whole of the ground floor of the Kunst- Werke with asphalt. In Turkey, asphalt laying was a means of homogenizing the country in its rapid quest to modernize, metaphorically covering over some of its diverse history in the process. Recalling conceptual practices of the 1960s the work also critiques the institutions and its potential to flatten ideas, concepts or histories. Ground Control will be recreated in the final room of Forward!
Image: Ahmet Öğüt, Forward! Design: Collective Works, Peter Zuiderwijk.
