FIKRET ATAY
In his two latest works, Turkish-born Kurdish artist Fikret Atay cleverly avoids the problem of subjectivity that attends documentary video, using a handheld camera to record low-key performances in and around his hometown of Batman, near the Turkey-Iraq border. While the videos are clearly staged, the simple, direct style makes them feel "genuine" and authentic. In Tinica, 2004, a young man on top of a mountain, overlooking the suburbs of the city far below, arranges some empty tin cans, then starts to play them as if they were a drum set. When he's finished, he kicks the cans down the steep hillside. The second film, Lalo's Story, 2004, shows a traditional Kurdish storytelling performance that vacillates between song and speech—except that the singing and speaking is in broken English, not Kurdish. Despite the language switch, the codes and rituals of the performance remain mysterious and difficult for Westerners to understand. Turkey is about to become one of the largest members of the European Union, if it abides by the EU's human rights guidelines—a proviso that would include freedom of expression for Turkey's many Kurds, who are still not permitted to learn their own language at school. This, of course, is the subtext of Atay's work—the banal and "real" are only the top layer of a much more complicated structure, which he exposes with elegance and simplicity.