Ahmet Ogut

Listings(s)

‘We Won’t Move!’

The title of the show was inspired by the slogan ‘We Won’t Move!’ (‘Ons dak nie, ons phola hier’) that was used by Sophiatown residents during the 1955 forced removals, and that was engraved in public memory by the eminent image by Jurgen Schadeberg. The satellite project in Johannesburg resonates with the GCTS exhibition chapter ‘Sequestrating History’, for which artist Ahmet Ogut has been reflecting on the act of appropriating or seizing something from the possession of its ‘owner’, on acts of resistance in the urban context and on Henri Lefebvre’s idea of ‘The right to the city’.

Ogut’s first solo exhibition project in South Africa will bring together a selection of previous works including the videos ‘Things We Count’ (2008) and ‘Light Armoured’ (2006), as well as a new photo-collage series ‘We Won’t Leave’ informed by the archival pictures. The series of 6 collages depicts people attacked by police dogs during historical protests superimposed upon images of destruction taken by the artist himself in Istanbul, Belgrade, Diyarbakir, Sao Paulo and Beirut.
 
More about the project:

The art and research project ‘Giving Contours to Shadows’ focuses on voiceless shadows and on alternative narrations in which all is said without necessarily uttering words. The reference to Edouard Glissant’s opacity in the title is a poetic allusion to giving forms to historical narratives, but also a wink at the sheer elasticity and fluidity of history: artists and contributors to the project ‘Giving Contours to Shadows’ do not strive to find words for a history that has been omitted; willingly or unwillingly, they recount the past and history’s trace to the present through works that stand as a voice of the unspoken or the unuttered, and they do not seek to represent ‘historical facts’ but dare to portray an alternative historical narrative and question the dominant canon. As an alternative medium to language, art succeeds in occupying the space between the ‘factual’ and the ‘nonfactual’. For more information on the project see http://givingcontours.net/

Please join us at the opening on Saturday 6 December from 6pm

Ahmet Ogut  will give a talk at 6 for 6.30pm

06 December 2014 - 13 December 2014