"Little lessons in joy
*The transformative power of art is the real subject of Fikret Atay's trio of brief videos at the Hammer Museum.
By David Pagel, Special to The Times
Fikret Atay's three short videos at UCLA's Hammer Museum are being promoted as 'short vignettes of life in Batman, a Kurdish city near the border between Turkey and Iraq.' But the young artist's wonderfully unassuming works are actually about the power of art. The grim, politically charged reality of Atay's hometown is merely the backdrop against which his low-budget, highly sophisticated videos enact their transformative magic.
'Bang! Bang!' (2003) is the shortest. At a little more than two minutes, it follows four little boys as they play guns among stationary freight trains. Squirming between wheels, clambering over couplings, crawling along tracks and leaping from ladders, the four energetic kids mimic the sounds of gunfire as they engage in a make-believe battle with plastic weapons."
More:calendarlive.com: Little lessons in joy
