Queer art of parallaxed document: the visual discourse of docudrag in Kutlug Ataman's Never My Soul!

Abstract

The video art of Kutlu Ataman problematizes ethnography as method and documentary as genre. Ataman's subjects on screen construct themselves in front of the camera, via talk and self-performance, where the artist's strategically unmarked authority reveals a critical ambiguity in terms of agency, identity and identification. Self-aware of their global reach and critically attentive to the contemporary ethnographic turn in the visual arts scene, Ataman's video-works enact a conscientious failure in representation. Through the performative storytelling of Ceyhan Firat Hizal, a Turkish pre-op transsexual living in Switzerland, Kutlu Ataman's Never My Soul! (2001) translates to video-art practice the critical potentials of mockumentary and its pseudo-ontological relation to drag performativity. Queering genres of visual identification, Never My Soul! films and documents Ceyhan's self-performance in drag, where the drag act, autobiographical revelations, testimony and self-confession are intentionally supplemented by, and confused with, a strategically rewritten script of 'original' conversations. Oscillating between, and mocking, the generic truth claims of Yeilam melodrama, porn and confessional documentary realism, Ataman's video is a hybrid of multilayered artifice and excess. This essay treats Ataman's video Never My Soul! as a theoretical metafilmic object which simultaneously confronts the contemporary articulations of surface/depth in queer aesthetics and of the flattened indexicality in global art documentary