Ahmet Öğüt

steirisicher herbst festival | Graz, Austria

Paranoia TV

SAHA provides support for Ahmet Öğüt's new project at steirischer herbst festival in Graz, held on 24 September - 18 October 2020.

steirischer herbst reacts to the fears and uncertainties of today's world and reinvents itself as a media consortium. Paranoia TV becomes a platform for the uncanny and disturbing. Broadcasting on several frequencies around the world, it responds artistically and critically to the global pandemic and the complications it has introduced, not only to our everyday lives, but also with regards to the production of cultural events.

Long before the global pandemic ever broke out, artists were making artworks at home and addressing their domestic surroundings. In doing so, they’ve been continually discovering and inventing new meanings of this “home” as a purportedly universal notion. Apartments become studios and museums. Kitchens and sleeping areas become politically loaded terrain, spaces for action, and places to subvert the semiotics of everyday life, mostly through humor. Ahmet Öğüt’s new documentary film-essay for Paranoia TV explores this history with examples from Anri Sala, Nina Yuen, Ulay, Lala Raščić, Harun Farocki, Martha Rosler, Constant Dullaart, Cengiz Tekin, Jonas Lund, Agnieszka Polska, Kuang-Yu Tsui, Nevin Aladağ, Hussein Chalayan, Aernout Mik, Ana Hušman, Ziad Antar, and many others.

On the occasion of the premiere of his new film on Paranoia TV, Ahmet Öğüt and Ekaterina Dogt discuss the many historical examples of art made at home, for home, and about its political meaning today. Please click here.

About Ahmet Öğüt

Ahmet Öğüt works across a variety of media, often picking up on an urban environment. With an eye for daily encounters and moments of improvisation, his works address topics such as structural inequality, state suppression and forms of resistance. Collective struggles and singular acts of non-alignment equally inspire the aesthetic and thematic reflections that occur in his work, just as the way he operates in the institutional ecology surrounding his practice. He is the founder of The Silent University. Selected exhibitions: The Missing T, untilthen, Paris (2018); Hotel Resistance, KOW, Berlin (2017); Goshka Macuga & Ahmet Öğüt, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2017, solo); Action!, Kunsthaus Zürich (2017); Museum On/OFF, Centre Pompidou, Paris (2016); Forward!, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2015, solo); Happy Together: Collaborators Collaborating, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2015, solo); Political Populism, Kunsthalle Wien (2015); Performa 13, The Fifth Biennial of Visual Art Performance, New York (2013); Tensta Museum: Reports from new Sweden, Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm (2013); Ahmet Öğüt, Protocinema/Itinerant, New York (2012, solo). In 2016, his works were exhibited at the 11th Gwangju Biennale, the Okayama Art Summit, and Manifesta 11, Zurich. Previously, he participated at the 13th edition of Biennale de Lyon (2015), the 19th Biennale of Sydney (2014), the 7th Liverpool Biennial and Bucharest Biennale 5 (2012).