For its second presentation at Independent, Niru Ratnam will show the work of two artists, Kutluğ Ataman and Sutapa Biswas. Both artists have been exhibiting since the late 1980s and 1990s, consistently making work that explores the poetics of identity. Each has exhibited in numerous museum and institutional exhibitions, and between them have work in collections that include MoMA, Tate, Guggenheim, Arts Council England and Museo Reina Sofia amongst others.
Kutluğ Ataman (b.1961 Istanbul, Turkey) went to film school in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. He returned to Turkey in the mid-90s as an openly gay practitioner making feature films. In 1997, Ataman changed technique, pointing a camera at the opera singer Semiha Berksoy for almost eight hours. The resulting work kutlug ataman's semiha b. unplugged, was picked up by the curator of the Istanbul Biennial and then in quick succession Ataman showed at the Venice Biennial (1999), the Berlin Biennial (2001), Sao Paulo Biennial (2002) and documenta 11 (2002). He won he Carnegie Prize in 2004, the same year that he was shortlisted for The Turner Prize in 2004.
Ataman's most well-known works often focus on allowing his subjects to tell their stories and articulate their subject positions. These figures are mostly socially marginalised, either through circumstance, societal convention or geographical isolation. Many of the figures articulate a questioning of social hierarchies or norms in favour of more marginal ways of thinking about the world, and prefigured later debates in contemporary art. As Elizabeth Schambelan wrote in Artforum in 2010 on Ataman's mid-career retrospective at Istanbul Modern, " The artist's grand themes-the heroic nature of self-creation and self-transformation, the fluidity and inherent performativity of gender, sexuality, and personality-are themselves politically sensitive, insofar as they are unabashedly queer."
Sutapa Biswas (b.1962 Santiniketan, India) is a British Indian conceptual artist, who works across a range of media including painting, drawing, film and time-based media. Her practice questions the complexities of racial and gendered power relations born out of tangled colonial histories and Biswas has developed a powerful language in her practice that transcends questions of histories, time, and space.
Biswas participated in the emergence of the Black Arts Movement in Britain in the mid-1980s being selected immediately following her graduation for the landmark exhibition curated by Lubaina Himid, 'The Thin Black Line' at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1985. In the years following that breakout moment, Biswas turned to making more nuanced works about exile, migration, the family and the body. Andrew Nairne, the director of the institution Kettle's Yard that Biswas had a solo show in 2021-22 describes Biswas's later working method as "through the intuitive, through the poetic, through the personal." This combination is very much in evident in the works that will be presented at Independent from the series 'Time flies' accompanied by the film Magnesium Bird.
What is it to yearn for flight, for escape either to a better future or a different country? This presentation of works by Ataman and Biswas speaks of the yearning of the migrant, the desire to better oneself and be elsewhere whilst acknowledging the losses that this will inevitably bring. It asks us to think about the condition of the migrant in an age where that figure is politically demonised, to start to think otherwise about that figure.
