M HKA Ensembles

Installation, 00:45:00.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. BK007584).

Twelve consists of six free-hanging screens in a darkened space onto which six videos are projected. On each screen we encounter one of six inhabitants from a small village in the partly Arabized southeastern part of Turkey, each recounting their particular experience of reincarnation seemingly typical of the region - hence the doubling of the original six protagonists to which the title refers: we see the projected image from both sides of the screen, thereby ‘seeing‘ the narrator on both sides of the culturally defined divide between life and death. Ataman’s camera-eye (or camera-I) registers these various witnesses with the steady gaze of an anthropologist’s valuation of (if not belief in) the story being told, no matter how outlandish. Yet what matters most in this work is the survivor’s subjectivity, fantastical or not; Ataman does not think of himself as a documentary maker, he is merely interested in “making extremely objective works about extremely subjective experiences”.