Inside the Fortress, 2017

Video

In Inside the Fortress architecture becomes the visual medium for a tricky political narrative. When he was nineteen, Öğüt was hired to help manufacture an architectural model of the famous Great Mosque of Diyarbakır, doing wage labor as a painter on the illusion of a replica of the UNESCO World Heritage-listed structure that is now in the Miniatürk miniature park in Istanbul. In 2016, Öğüt goes back to film “his” early work like the virtual setting of a fantasy or shooter game, combining the images with fragments of sound recordings from heavy combat during round-the-clock curfews that turned the historic Sur district inside the Diyarbakır Fortress into a war zone in 2016. We hear an assassination being foretold, followed by a report of a shooting during the curfew. Finally, the minaret appears, barred by a police cordon. Cut to closing credits.

INDEX:

Resistance

Politics

Turkey

Media

Oppression

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Ahmet Öğüt

**Information Power to the People, 2017**

**Pleasure Places of All Kind, 2014/2017**

Biography

Ahmet Öğüt, born in 1981 in Diyarbakır, works across a variety of different media often picking up on an urban environment. With an eye for daily encounters and moments of improvisation his works address topics such as structural inequality, state suppression, censorship and forms of resistance. Singular acts of non alignment or collective struggles against militarized powers equally tend to inspire the aesthetic and thematic reflections that occur in Ahmet Öğüt's work just as the way he operates in the institutional ecology surrounding his practice. He had solo shows among others at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2015), Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015), Künstlerhaus Stuttgart (2012), Kunsthalle Lissabon (2011) and SALT Beyoglu, Istanbul (2011). He has participated in group shows such as the 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), Manifesta 11 (2016), “Museum On/OFF” at Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016), the 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015), “Political Populism” at Kunsthalle Wien, the Kyiv Biennial (2015) and many more.

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