Ahmet Öğüt

Dhaka Art Summit | Bangladesh

SAHA provides support for Ahmet Öğüt’s project Balanced Protest Banners at Dhaka Art Summit between 3 February and 11 February 2023 to be presented at the exhibition Very Small Feelings, co-produced by Samdani Art Foundation and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art. Öğüt's project centers on a collective balance walk along young locals with multiple Bamboo stilts that have banners on top. These “walks” across the DAS venue for 9 days allude to how Bangladeshis in villages, as well as Indians in similar climactic contexts, address their rising water levels and find new ways to walk on unstable ground. In parallel to this, the show includes Jump Up!, an intervention where visitors look at historical collections in India and Bangladesh while jumping up on trampolines, reminding them of that childlike reach it takes to see something or to strive to understand. 

 “The word for flood, ‘Bonna,’ is also given as a common name for girls in Bangladesh. A flood in Bangladesh does not simply translate into the dominant idea of the word flood carrying a singular connotation of “disaster.” Rather, the DAS concept of Bonna challenges binaries - between necessity and excess, between regeneration and disaster, between adult and child, between male and female. DAS 2023 invokes and interprets Bonna as a complex symbol-system, which is indigenous, personal and at once universal, an embodied non-human reversal of how storms, cyclones, tsunamis, stars, and all environment crises and discoveries are named, allowing Bonna, the young girl, to speak from Bangladesh to the world; she asks why the words for weather are gendered, what the relationship between gender, the built environment, and climate change might be.“

Ahmet Öğüt (1981,Diyarbakır)is a sociocultural initiator, artist, and lecturer. Working across a variety of media, including photography, video, and installation, Öğüt often uses humor and small gestures to offer his commentary on rather serious or pressing social and political issues. Öğüt is regularly collaborating with people from outside of the art world to create shifts in the perception of the common. He has exhibited widely, and taught at several schools around the world, among which are Institut für Kunst im Kontext at Universität der Künste Berlin; Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht; Sandberg Institute Amsterdam; Finnish Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki; TransArts - Transdisziplinäre Kunst, Institut für Bildende und Mediale Kunst Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien; and DAI Arnhem. Öğüt was awarded the Visible Award for the Silent University in 2013, in addition to the special prize of the Future Generation Art Prize by Pinchuk Art Centre in 2012; the De Volkskrant Beeldende Kunst Prijs in 2011; and the Kunstpreis Europas Zukunft in 2010. Öğüt has co-represented Turkey at the 53rdVenice Biennale in 2009.

About The Dhaka Art Summit

The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Founded in 2012 by the Samdani Art Foundation—which continues to produce the festival—in collaboration with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, People’s Republic of Bangladesh, DAS is hosted every two years at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy.