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Kutlug Ataman Women Who Wear Wigs. - Review - video recording review
Art Journal, Winter, 1999 by Vasif Kortun
Kutlug Ataman's Women Who Wear Wigs (1999), a video installation featuring four women from Turkey who discuss when, where, why, and how they wear wigs, operates at the limits of documentary, fiction, and contemporary art. The installation consists of four video projections that run simultaneously for total durations of forty-five to sixty minutes. The women are real, not actresses playing fictional characters; and there are no sets, props, special lights, or dramatic editing used to create fictional mise-en-scenes. Although one could claim that Women Who Wear Wigs is a documentary, it is not a conventional television-like documentary featuring interviews with talking heads. Instead, it is one that delicately navigates the line between reality and fiction so that the viewer can never ascertain whether the stories that the women tell present a complete truth or whether they are personal mythologies.
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The hand-held camera helps to naturalize the viewer's gaze. It wanders, scans, and drifts around the spaces the women occupy, flirting with the image, as if it, and therefore the viewer, is a direct witness to the captivating stories that the women tell. In addition, it adopts a point of view sensitive to each woman's story; for example, it respects the anonymity of Woman No. 3 a devout Muslim, by showing only a black screen. Finally, the fact that the projections appear larger than life involves the viewer in a way that extends beyond the visual.
But the larger-than-life dimensions of the projections also manifest the installation's mythologizing dimension. In addition, even though the camera's gaze and the contexts in which the stories are told are not fabricated, they are planned. The fact that Ataman's questions are often edited out of the final cut, and that the women are therefore responding to questions unheard by the audience, also indicates that the relationship between the viewer and the stories that the women tell is not as unmediated as the gaze of the hand-held camera might imply. But what other option is there to arrive closer to presenting what is called the truth? When the projections are viewed side by side, the poignant individual stories articulate an enveloping ideological and historical panorama that encourages the viewer to reflect on his or her own existence.
Within this panorama, wearing a wig fulfills many functions. It serves as a disguise for concealing repressed identities in a nation in which the visual construction of identity is a painfully urgent issue. It is a substitute for hair and, as such, signifies a biological lack with social implications. Operating as a trope for the creation, change, or concealment of a given identity, the wig, for each of the four women featured in the installation, unfolds beyond generalized and historically stable forms of identity production and invites a reflection on gender and state repression of a most perilous nature.
Woman No. 1 During the early 1970s, Melek Ulagay sympathized with a left-wing youth organization and was chosen by the State as a sacrificial goat. A young revolutionary who acted as a courier for her organization, she evaded the junta by disguising herself as a flight attendant and was eventually turned in to the authorities by a police informant who mistook her for a terrorist--the infamous "Hostess Leyla," a fictitious Turkish Airlines flight attendant that the junta created who was also a demented bomber. Forced into that role, she had no choice but to run. To disguise herself, she wore a long blonde wig, which made her even more conspicuous in a city where most women are dark-haired and where blonde women are often considered to be of dubious morals. Ulagay is shot first in a wig store, and then before the mirror in her bedroom. Her face is always disguised, usually cut by the frame.
Woman No. 2 is Nevval Sevindi, a well known journalist. She has become temporarily bald as a result of chemotherapy following a breast cancer diagnosis. She is shot in a confrontational fashion, wearing a commanding and happy hue of pink during her chemotherapy, as she faces her baldness, and later more fatalistic and somber colors at the hairdresser's, where she reflects on womanhood, intimacy, and baldness.
Woman No. 3 prefers not to reveal her identity because she is concerned for her safety; hence, the frame is completely black, and one can only hear her voice recounting her story. She is a devout Muslim student not allowed to enter the classrooms of the university she attends because she wears a religious scarf, which the state does not allow in public buildings. She faces the difficulty of choosing between faith and education. Her solution is to wear a wig. This way, she looks secular enough to the authorities at the university, while her head is covered, as her faith requires.
Woman No. 4 is Demet Demir, a transsexual prostitute and activist, Demir is balding. Although she is a feminist who resists society's constant pressure on women to be beautiful at all times, she wears wigs because she has to work as a prostitute. When she is arrested, the police ridicule her and shave her head as punishment.
