Akram Zaatari presents his first major UK solo presentation at FACT on the occasion of the Liverpool Biennial. The work within the exhibition considers private and public interactions with the human body and the technological apparatus. Zaatari's show takes us from the intimacy of a photographer's studio in Egypt to an inspiring 4-channel media installation consisting of private videos of Arab youth, found on YouTube. The artist considers the thin line that connects us to the public - exploring various techniques - studying the relationship between a photographer and his muse, as well as the solitary relationship between Arab male youth and social media.

All works are UK Premieres.

The Works

Her + Him (2012) consists of a single channel-film, Her + Him Van Leo (1998-2012) and a vitrine of photographs taken by legendary Armenian photographer Van Leo in 1959. The vitrine shows an Egyptian woman called Nadia undressing in twelve different positions who is also the subject of the film. This expanded documentary is a dialogue between photography and video.

Another Resolution (1998) presents a series of images of children taken at different photographic studios in different poses. Zaatari noticed that these children often possessed seductive attitudes, and so decided to invite grown ups to embody the same poses as the children - reflecting the adult attitude suggested by the different poses taken by the original photographer. This work serves as a comment on the photographer's power to affect the social codes expected of both children and adults in photographic practice.

Bodybuilders (2011)
Bodybuilders is a series of photographs taken in the Southern Lebanese port city of Sidon (Saida). The images are reproduced from damaged negatives taken by Hashem al Madani in 1948. The eroded images create a poetic juxtaposition in contrast with the strapping youth of the bodybuilders depicted within them.

Dance to the End of Love (2011) is a four-screen media installation consisting of found YouTube footage of Arab youth who have decided to film themselves and share these rushes freely online. Zaatari notes that all of these films were produced on the eve of what is today referred to as the 'Arab Uprising', and as such, considers the role of YouTube as a space that is both intimate and public.

Dance to the End of Love was made out of low resolution footage made mainly with mobile phones in Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Saudi-Arabia and Oman, and showing male bodybuilders, men driving cars and riding motorcycles, singing and dancing, but when included within this 4-channel-video, this unique piece becomes a symphony in 5 movements about the loneliness of the oppressed, about hundreds of thousands crushed and forgotten in their home countries, who choose to use their computer screens as sites to live out their collective, heroic dreams.


Akram Zaatari, b. 1966, Saida, is an artist who lives and works in Beirut, Lebanon. Recent exhibitions include Photography: New Documentary Forms (Tate Modern, London, U.K., 2012), Composition for Two Wings(Contemporary Art Centre Vilnius, Lithuania, 2012), and Seeing is Believing (Kunst-Werke Berlin, Germany, 2011).

10,000 fragrant and velvety red roses are packed onto the gallery floor, where over the summer months they are left to blacken and die. Initially glowing and vibrant, the petals will darken and add the evocation of death and decay to themes of celebration and love. This sensual bed of rose heads atop green leaves and thorny stems suggests extravagance and romance; yet, over time, may become cliché, obsessive, and even dangerous.

New York, NY: Sperone Westwater is pleased to announce its representation of artist Kutlug Ataman and his first solo exhibition at the gallery. Ataman returns to New York after eight years of working intensively in Europe and the Middle East. In much of his recent work, he casts his gaze on the history and modernization of Turkey, his native country. Kutlug Ataman: Mesopotamian Dramaturgies, on view 1 November through 22 December 2012, will include four important video installations from the artist's latest series.

Mesopotamian Dramaturgies (2009-2011) revisits the recent history of Mesopotamia -- the "cradle of civilizations" that has witnessed the birth of many cultures and nations -- to focus on the tension between tradition and modernization. Ataman's interest in the representation of the individual or the collective through narrative widens to the concepts of history and geography, and to the way a nation forms and stages its own narrative. In speaking about the series, Ataman says:

I remain very interested in our constructs; how we construct our narratives, but I have moved from people to community -- how groups of people create their own common mythology, how we construct our knowledge of history and geography, how we rewrite each other's stories and how these stories are imposed in cultures.

Mayhem (2011) is about the destruction of old structures in order to create new ones, and was made at the dawning of the Arab spring. Ataman uses water as his main subject not only for its cleansing symbolism, but also for its destructive force. Mayhem is a multi-screen video sculpture that can be viewed from both outside and from within.

Journey to the Moon (2009) depicts the activities of inhabitants of a remote village in eastern Anatolia who reportedly set off for the moon on board a minaret transformed into a spaceship. This entirely fictional story is set in 1957, around the time of the Cold War space race. Using a sequence of black and white still shots, 'fabricated evidence', and a scripted voiceover, this footage is juxtaposed with interviews by contemporary Turkish scholars who comment on the topics addressed in the story. Ambiguously suspended between reality and artifice, Journey to the Moon alternates these two narrative levels in a structure similar to that of investigative television reports, where the opinions of experts lend depth to the documentary materials.

In English as a second language (2009), Ataman projects a film of two Turkish schoolboys reciting "nonsensical" English poems by Edward Lear, hampered by the difficulty of a newly-acquired language and the absurdity of the text they are reading. This work is complemented by The complete works of William Shakespeare (2009), in which the entire folio of works by Shakespeare, painstakingly hand-transcribed by the artist, are projected as a scrolling image, alluding to the notion of the book as a source of enlightenment. Both works refer to the complexities of a country finding its place in a globalized world in which English is the lingua franca.

Born in 1961 in Istanbul, Ataman lives and works in London, Islamabad and Istanbul. He is the recipient of the 2004 Carnegie Prize, awarded for the workKüba (2004), originally commissioned by ArtAngel, London and exhibited at the 54th Carnegie International; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna. Recent solo exhibitions include The National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome (2010), a mid-career retrospective at Istanbul Modern (2010-2011), and ARTER, Istanbul (2011). Ataman's works have been shown at many international exhibitions including the Istanbul Biennial (1997, 2003, 2007, 2011), the Venice Biennale (1999), the Berlin Biennale (2001), the Sao Paulo Bienal (2002, 2010), and Documenta 11 (2002), as well as the Tate Triennial (2003).

For more information and images, please contact Maryse Brand at +1 212 999 7337 or maryse@speronewestwater.com.

Garden of Reason was an exciting season of contemporary art held at Ham House and Garden over the Summer of 2012.

The 17th-century garden at Ham served as inspiration and setting for eight major commissions, ranging from sculpture to film, sound pieces and performance, as well as a series live art events. The exhibition was further animated by a series of talks and tours.

The project also offered the chance for Ham House and Garden to get involved with its local community, and the interaction programme worked with local groups to produce fantastic new interpretations of the garden and even organise a unique evening event in August.

Steve McQueen is an internationally acclaimed artist whose work is primarily engaged with moving images. Born in London in 1969, he has, over the last twenty years, made a series of film and video installations designed for gallery-based presentation, along with two feature films made for cinematic release. His efforts in these two distinct, but interrelated, arenas have earned him a reputation as one of the most important and influential artists of his generation working with these media, and beyond. McQueen's earliest works are silent, and mostly black-and-white, often with a focus on the body, very often the artist's own. Subsequent pieces incorporate, as a general rule, sound and color, and often emerge from more elaborate investigations.

McQueen has been equally concerned with the act of recording moving images as he is with the specific conditions in which these images are presented. The size of the screen, the dimensions of the room, and the relationship between the viewer and the projection itself are all fundamental considerations. McQueen's thinking about formal and spatial relationships in this regard lends a sculptural element to his art. One work in particular,Queen and Country (2007-09), is an entirely sculptural installation with no moving image or sound component. Presented here for the first time outside of the United Kingdom, the work is a memorial to British men and women killed in military service during the most recent war in Iraq.

Most of McQueen's oeuvre-including his gallery-based installations as well as feature films-evidences a potent, at times oblique, political consciousness. Many works address specific social and historical moments in ways that seemingly emerge from documentary or journalistic impulses. Other films are more abstract, their meanings shaped by allegory or metaphor. McQueen always communicates directly to viewers through what one writer termed "the medium of aesthetic affect."