Author’s Name — Ahmet Öğüt

Author’s Name

2002
Performance
Proje4L Contemporary Art Museum

Local game Okey has been the subject of several of Ögüt’s works. Played with numbered chips and as popular as Backgammon in the more rural areas of Turkey, Okey is a game and in places like Diyarbakir consumes time in tea shops for the unemployed. In his youth, Ögüt and a friend set up a small business, which boasted the return of Okey chips ‘as good as new’ by repainting their embossed numbers for pocket money. When invited to participate in the exhibition Under the Beach the Pavement curated by Vasif Kortun at Proje4L Contemporary Art Museum in 2002, Ögüt recognised a familiar division between his activity and that of the Okey players in Diyarbakir and the location in Istanbul of the museum, then positioned on a fine-line separating the financial area of Levent and the residential, poverty stricken district of Gültepe. In order to locate an element of one site subtly into the other, Ögüt went about collecting chips form the community in Gültepe (this time without charge) to renew within the museum and return them next day without informing them that the task was performed in a museum during an opening. On the opening night of the exhibition Ögüt sat focused, painting these chips, doing a job he knew well and that performed multiple references for himself, having been a lived reality of his youth and a symbol of multiple cultures living side-by-side albeit in ignorance of one another.