Forty CRT Televisions in a Paris Chapel: Kutluğ Ataman’s I Am a Storyteller. But Is Story Everything?

Walking through the cool, vaulted stone silence of the Chapelle des Petits-Augustins—once a repository for cultural treasures salvaged from the pillage of the French Revolution—the site’s historical memory suddenly gives way to another era. There are no lavish projections here, nor any sleek, high-definition displays. Instead, in the autumn of 2026, alongside Art Basel Paris, visitors are met by the phosphorescent glow of forty cumbersome cathode-ray tube televisions strewn across the floor and set before worn armchairs. On each screen: a face, a pair of eyes, and dozens of distinct voices whispering simultaneously into the empty expanse of the chapel.

Twenty-two years on, the phantom of an informal settlement—a gecekondu neighbourhood on the western fringe of Istanbul, now long wiped off the map—breathes again in the heart of Paris.

Since its creation in 2004, Kutluğ Ataman’s seminal video installation Küba has traversed disparate geographies: from a decommissioned postal sorting office in London and a port warehouse in Belgium to a cargo barge drifting along the Danube. Yet the dialogue the work strikes within this historic chapel at the Beaux-Arts de Paris brings a foundational question—one Ataman posed in an interview with Maja Renfer—back to the surface with renewed urgency: “I am a storyteller. But is story everything?”

The Mental Geography of an Erased Neighbourhood

When Ataman first entered the neighbourhood in the early 2000s—where he would spend two full years with his camera—he encountered anything but an ordinary periphery. Hemmed in by towering working-class housing blocks, this precarious island of makeshift shacks spanned roughly the size of two football pitches. Established in the late 1960s by low-income labourers, Kurdish migrants, and leftist factions, it was an autonomous enclave where even the police hesitated to set foot: an insular sanctuary with its own moral codes, entirely closed off to outsiders. Its very name belonged to an unofficial mythology, christened Küba in homage to the Caribbean revolution.

Crucially, when Ataman trained his lens on the enclave, he chose not to record its alleyways, shanties, or dilapidated architecture, capturing only the residents’ faces. For Ataman, Küba was, above all, “a state of mind.” Within this radically insulated community, every inhabitant harboured their own account of Küba—a memory at once viscerally real and entirely imagined from whole cloth.

Today, none of those precarious dwellings remain. Following years of looming urban redevelopment threats, the neighbourhood was hollowed out, its residents displaced, and Küba struck from the physical world. All that survives are the faces, gazes, and forty distinct truths Ataman confined to forty monitors.

An ‘Impossibly Long’ Counter-Stance in the Age of Social Media

The year Küba was completed, 2004, also marked the founding of Facebook—a critical threshold in the digital era. In deliberate defiance of today’s algorithmic bite-sized content and impeccably curated monologues, Küba remains stubbornly, “impossibly long.”

To absorb these testimonies, unspooling across forty separate sets at once, in a single sitting is impossible. While a viewer leans in before one monitor to hear a young man insist, “They envied our love and respect for one another; no outsider could ever come between us,” an elderly woman’s voice drones from an adjacent screen in the background. Thus, while visitors may leave claiming to have seen Küba, no two people ever encounter the same work. Each viewer conducts their own internal edit across the forty screens, assembling a personal Küba before carrying it back into the world.

Here, Ataman enters a sharp caveat against facile art criticism and liberal clichés. He rejects the reductive label often pinned to the work upon its debut: the artist as a pre-social-media vessel “giving voice to the disempowered, to the other.” He may be a storyteller, but his ambition was never to paint a romantic tableau of solidarity. The real crux lies in the impossibility of communication—the inescapable fact that objective truth can never be fully relayed between teller and listener.

Turning the Mirror Inward: Why Was ‘Paradise’ Met with Silence?

Ataman made this stance unmistakably clear in the project that immediately followed Küba. Frustrated by an art world that consumed Küba merely as an exoticised, romantic narrative of the destitute and the oppressed, he decamped to one of California’s most affluent, elite enclaves to deploy the exact same methodology: Paradise.

The apparatus and installation remained identical, yet this time the subjects before his camera were not people scraping by in makeshift shacks, but wealthy, educated Americans from the upper echelons of society. Ataman proved that the construction of identity—the mechanics of manufacturing and perpetuating a collective mythology—functions identically across class divides.

Yet the reception diverged. While the art world continued to canonise Küba, Paradise was met with conspicuous indifference. The patrons and consumers of contemporary art—that educated, liberal, and comfortable gallery-going demographic—were accustomed to gazing empathetically upon the plight of the poor from a safe distance; Paradise, conversely, held the mirror up to their own faces. It was thoroughly inconvenient for them to confront the sheer artifice of their own sheltered, privileged mythologies.

Art as an Unfinished Sentence

Ataman notes that he does not keep a diary; instead, he views his body of work as an inventory of his life, observations, and evolving perceptions. With one key distinction: diaries look backward and turn inward, whereas an artwork is never a settled end-product. It is a point of departure—one that provokes fresh debate and opens unsettling fissures in the mind.

Standing in the gloom of that Parisian chapel, listening to the crackle and drone radiating from cathode-ray screens, it is precisely this sensation that lingers. The inhabitants of an erased neighbourhood continue to speak across forty voices and forty screens. Not to lecture us on what reality is, but to whisper that truth is far too fragmented, elusive, and ultimately untranslatable ever to be bound by a single frame.