Küba
Is Küba a place or a state of mind? Is Küba a liberated collective of outsiders, or an imaginary community established by the language of violence? Each inhabitant defines Küba differently, but many speak in terms of escape and freedom. Kutlug Ataman will be in London with his award-winning Küba .
The area known as Küba first emerged in the late 1960s as a neighbourhood of safe houses in a dangerous time. In today’s Istanbul, few people could tell you exactly where it is: some say
Küba lies in the southern part of the city, close to the airport, others doubt whether it still exists.
Today Küba comprises a few hundred makeshift clapboard dwellings that are still home to non-conformists of diverse ethnicity, religion and political persuasion united in their defiant disregard for state control. Kutlug Ataman spent more than two years exploring Küba,
mapping its physical and psychological terrain through the lives of forty inhabitants whose remarkable stories are the foundation for his most ambitious artwork to date. Initially uprooted in October 2004, the forty residents of Küba first appeared in Pittsburgh where Ataman’s multiple DVD installation – a commission for Artangel – won the prestigious Carnegie Prize.
From 22nd March 2005, the Küba community take up temporary residence in The Sorting Office on New Oxford Street in London from where, up until 1995, almost two million items of post were delivered every week. After London, Küba will travel to a railway station in Stuttgart, down the Danube to Vienna and disembark at a passenger ferry terminal on Circular Quay in Sydney before returning home to Istanbul in 2006.
