The sculptural installation Paradise (2007) follows on from Ataman’s seminal work Kuba (2005). The artist’s interest in storytelling, identity and community functionality continues as he presents twenty-four video portraits of residents from Orange County, Southern California. Each participant, including the oldest clown in the world, a wedding planner, car and star-obsessed teenagers, and the Laughing Yoga Institute of Laguna Beach, talks candidly and openly to the viewer.

Also on display in the exhibition is Ataman’s Stefan’s Room (2004), an individual portrait of Stefan Naumann from Berlin, Germany. This five-screen installation concentrates on Stefan’s all-consuming obsession with over 30,000 tropical moths which he has collected in his tiny apartment. This playful installation gives an insight into the complexity of Stefan’s fixation and the transformation he wishes to personally undertake.

A third installation, Turkish Delight is a single-screen video work and the first performance piece featuring the artist himself. Ataman, donning a wig and in the guise of a belly dancer, is shown shimmying and dancing. While the act is meant to attract, the dancer’s soul and unengaged demeanour ultimately convey the opposite: her disinterest in the beholder. Though repelled by the beholder, she nevertheless needs him to sustain herself. Consequently, the dancer is both a tragic and comic character. The piece, a semi-fictitious self-portrait, also touches upon notions of the West’s “gaze” towards Turkey and its definitions of the “exotic”. Click here to watch a clip of Turkish Delight.

Paradise is commissioned by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, and Treaty of Utrecht, Utrecht, The Netherlands, the Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston, UK, Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, USA, the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, USA, and the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada. Paradise is produced by Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü/ The Institute for the Readjustment of Clocks, Istanbul, Turkey.

Paradise Exhibition Catalogue
A full colour catalogue is available at £20, featuring colour photographs of the interviewees taken on location by Ataman, and essays by OCMA Curator of Contemporary Art Aimee Chang, cultural critic and urban historian Norman Klein, and critical theorist and art historian Irit Rogoff. To purchase your copy, please call (+44) 01772 258248, email harris.museum@preston.gov.uk for further details, or visit the museum shop.