Speculative Social Fantasies: Ahmet Öğüt

27th May - 10 July 2011

Floor Talk: Melanie Oliver: Curator, Artspace, Sydney

at the CACSA

Curated by Reuben Keehan.

CACSA PROJECTS 4, in the lead up to the 2011 Venice Biennale, presents Ahmet Öğüt who co-represented Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. Presented in association with Artspace, Sydney, this exhibition Speculative Social Fantasies is a selective panorama of Ahmet Öğüt's work that brings together a range of recent experiments in paradox and tragedy.

Ahmet Ögüt is a conceptual artist working across a broad range of media including video, photography, installation, drawing and printed media. With a keenly perceptive and sharp wit, Öğüt examines everyday happenstance, modes of behaviour and informal gestures which bear witness to broader global social and political structures. Through diverse means of expression, from installation and performance to drawing, video and interventions in public space, Öğüt weaves loose narratives that meander between artistic practice and social life to provoke critical consciousness and subtle shifts in perspective.

The notion of a speculative fantasy is itself tragic—as speculation it is pure fantasy, which is to say that of all possible futures, it is the one that won't eventuate; while as fantasy, its speculative character implies that it will never escape the space of the real. Perhaps this paradox, cast back onto realm of the social, defines the limits of possibility of the world in which we live, the very world whose absurd logic and occasional wonders the artist's work so frequently exposes through its subtle perceptual shifts and keenly observed re-framings. It is this charismatically subversive sensibility, at once darkly humorous and profoundly empathetic, that characterises Öğüt's wry artistic propositions for daily life.

Born in Diyarbakir, Turkey in 1981, Öğüt currently resides in Amsterdam. Winner of the Volkskrant Art Prize 2011, Öğüt›s recent solo exhibitions include Stones to Throw, Kunsthalle Lissabon, Lisbon; Underestimated Zones, Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis; Ricochet # 4, Museum Villa Stuck, Munich; Speculative Social Fantasies, Artspace Visual Arts Centre, Sydney; Things we count, Künstlerhaus Bremen; Mutual Issues, Inventive Acts, Kunsthalle Basel; Across the Slope, Centre d'Art Santa Monica, Barcelona. Selected group exhibitions include 5th Berlin Biennial for

Media Release (PDF)