Ahmet Ogut
dal 6/3/2015 al 13/6/2015
Segnalato da
6/3/2015
Ahmet Ogut
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Forward!. The artist works across media and platforms, realizing projects within and outside the walls of the museum: in the street, on stage, in lectures halls, or through film.
Curated by: Nick Aikens and Annie Fletcher
Ahmet Öğüt’s most ambitious solo presentation to date opens in the Van Abbemuseum on 7 March.
Forward! will bring together a number of key projects from the past several years alongside new site
specific commissions created for the Van Abbemuseum. These projects will be presented throughout the
museum’s Old Building but will also spill out beyond its ten galleries in surprising ways. The 34-year-old
Kurdish artist works across media and platforms, realizing projects within and outside the walls of the
museum: in the street, on stage, in lectures halls, or through film. The artist uses allegory, humour and
satire, inviting us to take a fresh look at the world around us.
The title of the exhibition playfully draws on the rhetoric
and history of socialist solidarity and progress, sentiments
that are both espoused and interrogated in Öğüt’s
projects. Specifically, it is a reference to a work from
2012, The Castle of Vooruit! In which a workers co-
operative in Ghent floats on an enormous helium balloon.
This 10-metre high floating rock, inspired by the famous
Belgian surrealist painter Magritte, is being erected
outside Ghent for the first time and will hover above the
Van Abbe for the duration of the show. Forward! also
expresses Öğüt’s interventions in and observations of
society, which he often frames with new contexts, setting
our perceptions and pre-conceptions in motion in
surprising ways. In Fahrenheit 451: Reprinted a fire engine
becomes the focal point for issuing copies of banned
books, and in Guppy vs Ocean Wave: A Bas Jan Ader
Experience Öğüt placed a boat on the lake outside the
Van Abbe to resurrect the story of the Dutch artist who
famously died at sea. The extraordinary dynamism of
Öğüt’s work can be felt in the exhibition through the great
diversity of projects, which reveal his ability to address
audience and ideas in multivalent forms.
immigrants to set up ad hoc teaching structures and
seminars which is now active in Stockholm, Berlin and
London – or the School of Urgencie s, a programme for a
group of cross-disciplinary students in Istanbul.
In the Learning Room, one of the galleries of the
exhibition, Öğüt will lead a week-long workshop for
students of the Dutch Art Institute, amongst others, during
the first week after the opening. He will take a language
course in Dutch himself, which will conclude with an open
tour for visitors at the end of the second week.
Throughout the exhibition the Learning Room will be
open for University and High school students to
experiment with learning.
About Ahmet Öğüt
Ahmet Öğüt was born in in Diyarbakir, Turkey in 1981 and
studied at the Hacettepe University en the Yildiz Technical
University. From 2007 to 2008 he studied at the
Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. His work has been included
all over the world including the biennales of Venice
(2009), Berlin (2008), Santa Fe (2008), Thessaloniki (2007)
and Istanbul (2005). His practice captures the imagination
in unique ways, tackling complex political and economic
themes with a lightness of touch. For example, in 2008 he
presented Ground Control at the Berlin Biennale, where
he covered the whole of the ground floor of the Kunst-
Werke with asphalt. In Turkey, asphalt laying was a
means of homogenizing the country in its rapid quest to
modernize, metaphorically covering over some of its
diverse history in the process. Recalling conceptual
practices of the 1960s the work also critiques the
institutions and its potential to flatten ideas, concepts or
histories. Ground Control will be recreated in the final
room of Forward!
Image: Ahmet Öğüt, Forward! Design: Collective Works, Peter Zuiderwijk.
Press Contact:
Hilde van der Heijden , Communication & Press
Phone: +31 (0)40 238 1019 / Mobile: + 31 (0)6 12995794
Mail: pressoffice@vanabbemuseum.nl
Van Abbemuseum
Bilderdijklaan 10
Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Opening hours
Tuesday to Sunday 11:00 – 17:00
Every first Thursday of the month the museum is open until 21:00.
Admission
Adults: € 12- / Groups of 10 or more: € 9,- / Young people from 13-18 years,
students / Eindhoven city pass (stadspas) holders: € 6,- / Museumkaart, children
under 13 years of age: free of charge. / Family pass (2 adults and max. 3 children
until 18 years): €18,-
First Thursday evening of the month from 17.00-21.00: free of charge