Curated by Stella Rollig

Over the past decade, Kutlug Ataman has produced a remarkable corpus of video installations simply by asking his subjects to speak into his camera about their interests, hopes, and dreams. Without judging or editorializing, Ataman’s films celebrate eccentricities and explore how the stories we tell shape our ever-shifting sense of self and place in the world. The artist’s latest venture, “Mesopotamian Tales,” comprises seven new works—documentary-style interviews with various Turkish constituencies—conceived and organized by Ataman as a singular installation, investigating his homeland’s relationship to the “new Europe.” Bringing into dialogue divergent conceptions of tradition and modernity, religion and secularism, self and other, the exhibition promises to complicate the terms of each in Ataman’s inimitable poetic style.

— Jordan Kantor