Ahmet Ögüt
07 Mar - 14 Jun 2015
AHMET ÖGÜT
FORWARD!
art in multivalent forms
www.forwardvooruit.com
7 March - 14 June 2015
Curators: Nick Aikens and Annie Fletcher
Curatorial Assistant: Lena Reisner
In the Spring of 2015 the Van Abbemuseum will host Kurdish artist Ahmet Ögüt (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.
Ögüt’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. Ögüt’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. Ögüt 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 Ögüt’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 Ögüt’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, Ögüt’s approach sits with one of the Van Abbemuseum’s core beliefs that art has the capacity to make us ‘imagine the world otherwise’.
FORWARD!
art in multivalent forms
www.forwardvooruit.com
7 March - 14 June 2015
Curators: Nick Aikens and Annie Fletcher
Curatorial Assistant: Lena Reisner
In the Spring of 2015 the Van Abbemuseum will host Kurdish artist Ahmet Ögüt (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.
Ögüt’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. Ögüt’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. Ögüt 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 Ögüt’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 Ögüt’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, Ögüt’s approach sits with one of the Van Abbemuseum’s core beliefs that art has the capacity to make us ‘imagine the world otherwise’.