Growing up in a distinctively militarized and anti-Kurdish environment, Ahmet Öğüt has rejected simplistic projections of identity and politics, and yet, considering the dominant narratives that mistakenly subsume Öğüt’s work under Turkish art, still has to navigate them. It might thus be no surprise that oppression and liberation are constantly hovering in the background of Öğüt’s work. Throughout his career, Öğüt has worked at re-imagining and re-working the institution—artistic or otherwise—to claim the in-between spaces that emerge whenever boundaries are too fixed. Öğüt’s artistic practice bears testimony to and negotiates the way technologies concretize this in-between as their reach expands further into material worlds, interrogating how they cross and intensify human experiences of space, time, and community. Monuments of the Disclosed (2022) illustrates this density, as the virtual sculptures enter everyday reality, allowing visitors to investigate them as an additional layer of knowledge production. The ‘monuments’ represent eight historical whistleblowers, Bunnatine (Bunny) Greenhouse, Li Wenliang, Mona Hanna- Attisha, Kimberly Young-McLear, Aaron Swartz, Karen Silkwood, Phillip Saviano, and Marsha Coleman- Adebayo, and individuals who all transgressed the informational status quo to call attention to injustice and governmental malfeasance. These oftentimes tragic heroes of the information age bear testimony to Öğüt’s interest in knowledge production and its entanglement with art, science, and politics, an intellectual and artistic investment which has also accompanied Öğüt’s work as a lecturer, thinker, practitioner, and activist. 

Works in the exhibition: Monuments of the Disclosed (2022), QR codes, a set of eight digital monuments. Courtesy of the artist