ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Ataman's 40-channel video installation Kuba in relation to the issues of displacement and urban marginality as well as performative storytelling and site-specificity. Focusing on the theme raised by Ataman's installation, the commissioned works explored, in various forms and languages, issues of migration, borders, visibility-invisibility, and minorities. Each time, the spatial articulation and experience of Kuba have changed in relation to the architectural, historical, and cultural specificity of its location, as the work has taken on the memories and sociopolitical registers of the sites of its display. The representation of Istanbul as a city of migration is not unfamiliar to viewers of Turkish cinema, which has addressed internal mass migrations, urban decay, and class conflicts since the 1950s. Migration was formative in the rapid growth of Istanbul in the second half of the twentieth century, so much so that contemporary Istanbul can be considered a 'city of migrants', with most of its adult population born elsewhere in Turkey.
