Kutlug Ataman, "Stefan's Room"

At one bittersweet moment in Kutlug Ataman's video installation, as we watch a poor bug flapping in a poisoned specimen jar, our protagonist, Stefan, explains that moths don't really feel pain. Rows and rows of gorgeous moths, butterflies and other bugs surround the collector's room, pictured on Ataman's five screens that hover in the gallery's darkened space. As a result, viewers feel the claustrophobia of being among the thousands of specimens Stefan has painstakingly bred, collected and pinned into tidy boxes. Admitting that when he was a boy, he had difficulty ending the brief life of a moth, Stefan then realized that it was necessary in order to keep the specimen for his collection.

Casually watching Ataman's 48-minute video, we get to know this unassuming butterfly collector through his soft-spoken delivery as he shows us around the jam-packed room. The Turkish artist reveals the exacting personality of this subject with close-ups and extreme close-ups, at times even aiming the lens through a microscope to focus on a moth's hairy antenna. Ataman, who trained at UCLA's graduate film program and short-listed for the 2004 Turner Prize, seems to be mimicking Stefan's obsession with his camera, offering exacting shots of research books, breeding trays and spreading boards to which the insects are pinned to dry. Gradually our admiration for both Stefan's and Ataman's project grows into respect: Even though documentary film is never truly objective, and even though we have to kill to collect and classify, both endeavors eventually yield great depths of knowledge and beauty.

Time slows down in Stefan's room and, in the end, it is life that wins out. Chubby caterpillars munch on bright green leaves, a moth fresh from a pupa gingerly stretches its new wings, and the highly evolved patterns of the insects' wings, though perhaps useful for camouflage in the field, are simply magnificent. A man enters the room dressed in an outlandish insectlike headpiece and cloak. As he swirls and exits, Stefan expresses feeling for this human specimen as well his beloved insects, suggesting that this guy is "my favorite butterfly," with a little grin on his face.–Kathryn Hixson