East Meets West
Kutlug Ataman at Sperone Westwater Is The Daily Pic By Blake Gopnik
The Daily Pic: Kutlug Ataman imagines a space race with its feet on the ground.
(Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York)
A still that’s on display in a video installation by Kutlug Ataman called “Journey to the Moon”, in his solo show at Sperone Westwater gallery on the Bowery in New York. The piece is built around a long, fantastical narrative, set in 1957, about a village in far eastern Turkey whose residents decide to launch a rocket ship made from their mosque’s minaret. It’s totally charming and strange, even as it touches on all sorts of current issues: Religion and science, poverty and development, the past and the future, East and West, hopes and dreams and their conflict with reality.
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