In his technically simple, but provocative works, Ögüt touches upon some of the most burning, globally relevant issues, such as ethnical conflicts, terrorism, everyday media reality, always employing humor as a strategy and never ‘preaching’ or placing the “right” opinions or answers. It is exactly this combination of humor and ambiguity that creates an uneasiness which triggers the provocativeness of Ögüt’s visually attractive and humorous works. Ögüt often plays with the generally known symbols of power as, for example, in his new one-minute animation „Light Armoured“ (2006), which even provoked police intervention when it was first shown in Istanbul, as the work was interpreted as a support for terrorism, if not a straightforward terrorist threat. In this short and simple animation, repeating in a loop, Ögüt transforms an image of a Land Rover car into a military vehicle, providing it with combat equipment. The vehicle then becomes “victim” of an unknown attacker, who is throwing stones at it. The “attack”, however, repeating in endless loop produces a humorous and absurd effect, not at all succeeding in endangering the safety of the vehicle (here represents a symbol of power, pointing to the hopelessness of any efforts of resistance. Transformations of vehicles appear often in Ogut’s other works, where this motif is used to deconstruct naive and normative ways in which power is imposed on the lives of citizens. In the slide projection “Somebody Else’s Car” Ogut disguises an anonymous car (without the owner’s permission) first in the Istanbul taxi car and later into a police car, while in the video “Death Kit Train” we see a car slowly moving across the screen from right to left, and after a few seconds it is revealed that the car is being pushed an absurdly big group of people, evoking the absurdity of manual labour and the great number of those who remain “unemployed” in the process.
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Ahmet Ögut (Born 1981 in Diyarbakir, Turkey), lives and works in Istanbul, Turkey. He graduated at Hacettepe University, Fine Art Faculty, Painting Department, Ankara and received his MA at the Yildiz Teknik University, Art and Design Faculty, Istanbul. He is one of the editors of “muhtelif” contemporary art publication. Currently he is on the two-year residency at The Rijks Akademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.
