Ahmet Ögüt, Fahrenheit 451:Reprinted

Nato Thompson speaks with the Istanbul-based artist Ahmet Ögüt about collaboration and continuous engagement in life and art alike. Inspired by the Occupy Gezi movement’s demonstrations of solidarity across class and ethnic lines, Ögüt has carried over his fondness for unexpected alliances to the participatory projects that he undertakes as an artist. For his public performance Fahrenheit 451:Reprinted, Ögüt worked with a crew of on-duty firemen to assemble and operate a mobile book-printing studio inside a Helsinki fire truck in August 2013. After the artist acquired the rights to reprint 20 books banned by various countries in modern times (from The Communist Manifesto to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), the firemen produced 1,500 new copies of the titles during the week-long performance. Ögüt tells Thompson that the firemen’s ability to collaborate, improvise and act quickly is precisely “what’s missing in the art world.”

This program is part of a regular series, Forms of Life, hosted by Creative Time’s Chief Curator, Nato Thompson and produced for their online magazine, Creative Time Reports, in partnership with ARTonAIR.org. Guests are culture makers whose work posits new ways of looking at political realities. By addressing a wide range of issues such as alternative economies, calcified political structures, new forms of collective living, or simply being a thorn in the side of normality, Forms of Life interviews provide an opportunity to think counterintuitively about social conditions people face around the world.

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