Ahmet Öğüt: Neither Artificial Nor Intelligent
Ahmet Öğüt, widely recognised for his participatory and socially engaged projects, returns to Venice after representing Turkey at the Venice Biennale in 2009 with a new body of work revealing his rarely explored painting practice.
Titled “Neither Artificial nor Intelligent”, the exhibition presents a previously unseen selection of ten oil portraits from a larger series of fifty, created over the past three years. The works are on view exclusively on-site at A plus A Gallery from 6 November 2025 to 8 February 2026. Images of the artworks are released online only once they leave the artist’s possession, ensuring a fully in-person viewing experience free from digital mediation.
The 70 x 70 cm canvases depict both fictional and real artists with diverse practices, from various cities that remain undisclosed. The series explores why viewers associate particular faces with specific places or types of art and how bias shapes perception. It encourages an individual encounter with artists who rarely receive institutional recognition due to political status or origin, within a Western classificatory system influenced by artificial intelligence.
The title is drawn from “Atlas of AI” by Kate Crawford (Yale University Press, 2021), which highlights the tangible harm caused by AI, including war, environmental degradation, and social inequality. The exhibition examines the history of facial recognition, from phrenology to mass data collection to contemporary intelligent vision training, questioning how technological progress continues to rely on flawed classification systems shaped by human bias and power.
