Suat Öğüt

AVTO

By Kaya Genç

Amsterdam-based Kurdish artist Suat Öğüt has long employed Situationist tactics: His 2009 video Consumption Practices, for instance, filmed at an Istanbul mall, features nine individuals interrupting their shopping sprees with gymnastics exercises they perform with shopped items. Another video work, The Whole World Realized, 2010, shows the artist placing posters related to food products on roads in Istanbul. After he puts them up, cars and buses pollute and destroy the posters, turning advertisement into performative street art and highlighting the fragility of advanced capitalism’s aesthetics. 

At first glance, Öğüt’s recent show “Birdir Bîr”—the title plays with the Turkish word for leapfrogging, birdirbir, and the Kurdish word Bîr, referring to memory and recollection—was similarly performative. Put together with panache by up-and-coming curator Görkem İmrek, it took as its subject Hasankeyf, an ancient settlement in Turkey’s Batman province whose origins date back at least ten thousand years. When he was fifteen, Öğüt, then a fledgling artisan, worked on a model of the site, as an untitled photograph from 2001 shows. In 2019, despite national outrage, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government allowed Hasankeyf to be flooded as part of the Ilısu Dam project, dislocating its Kurdish population. In Kaybolan Manzarayı Tamamlamak(Completing the Disappeared Landscape), 2023, Öğüt offers a new model of the district by re-creating its topography. Caves, canyons, and abandoned buildings populate this reimagined town blanketed by a layer of candy wrappers. Situated at the intersection of personal history and environmental conservation activism, Öğüt’s city model envisions an afterlife for Hasankeyf.

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Nefes (Breath), 2022, a three-channel video, chronicles the making of Completing the Disappeared Landscape while investigating the site’s current state. It follows the journey of an explorer at night, with flashlights showing his path. Scenes of horses resting on hills, paper boats floating on water, and children flattening candy wrappers with stones accompany his travels, while the rhythm of the soundtrack underscores the noisy creation of the city model and its candy-wrapper blanket. The video, shot in 2022 by three different cinematographers, Veysel Çelik, Özgür Demirci, and Giovanni Giaretta, blurs the line between a city submerged due to human intervention and its artistic re-creation: Hands, hard at work on splitting and cracking rocks, or constructing components of Öğüt’s model, inflict violent force while extracting or building. One scene shows a man touching parts of the city model, playing the archaeological site like a musical instrument, presumably to exemplify Öğüt’s artful approach to his model and his refusal to produce a mimetic replica. Toward the end of the video we see the explorer submerged in water, but he emerges carrying a copper bucket and an oil lamp—objects that were part of the town’s life before the flood. As the “real” Hasankeyf is consigned to history, it begets novel discoveries and formations in its wake.

Öğüt’s exploration of ecological destruction takes a more decorative form in Birds of the Upper Mesopotamia,2023, whichcomprises mosaics depicting twelve avian species, some of which nest and breed in Hasankeyf. By reducing the flow of the Tigris, the Ilısu Dam project endangers birds living along the river. The artist produced these mosaics of the endangered birds in Istanbul and İzmir, using tesserae made from glass and basing his subjects on models from the wildlife media archive at Cornell University’s Macaulay Library. Cretzschmar’s bunting, for example, has a sturdy beak and a tail adorned with white feathers; it tweets with a sharp “zru-zru-zru-zru” sound, which visitors can hear—alongside other birdcalls taken from the same archive—via their smartphones. Öğüt’s use of mosaics frames these animals as extinct components of an ancient culture, while the digital accompaniment inspires questions about preservation, archives, and the future of remembrance. Installed at an airshaft adjacent to the exhibition space, Öğüt’s conference of birds embodied the potential to carry their urgent message about Hasankeyf’s submersion beyond the gallery walls.