Kutluğ Ataman, 1961

After graduating from the Galatasaray High School, Kutluğ Ataman studied cinema and television at the Mimar Sinan University and cinema at the Sorbonne University. He received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), where he continued on with his master of fine arts studies.

Kutluğ Ataman’s videos and films frequently document the lives of marginalized individuals. The subjects in his videos explicitly give voice to their own obsessions, their relations with micro and macro power structures, subliminal challenges and sexuality, disclosing themselves openly. The artist prefers to devise a narrative dangling between reality and fiction in his work, which chiefly retains the immediacy of documentary in style.

The video “Women Who Wear Wigs” shows four different women who all use wigs to hide and transform their repressed identities in Turkey in the 90s. While the videos in this four-screen installation individually reflect the reasons why these women wear wigs, the larger picture that emerges sets forth a social portrait regarding the problem of identity in Turkey’s recent history. The first woman in Ataman’s work is Melek Ulagay, who in the 70s was forced to live in hiding due to her political activities and therefore spent years of her life in disguise. The woman we see on the second screen, Nevval Sevindi, wears a wig to conceal the hair loss that resulted from chemotherapy and to regain her femininity. The third person, who preferred to hide her identity and talks from behind a black screen, is a university student who wears a wig to hide her headscarf which she is not allowed to wear at school due to the headscarf ban in Turkish universities. And the fourth woman is Demet Demir, an activist from the transsexual and transvestite community, who had their hair cut by the police to prevent them from doing prostitution during the transvestite ban in Beyoğlu in the early 90s.