Issue #27

After Terk, I had continued to use images from Maryam Şahinyan archive, but after that series, my approach to found images slightly changed. As you said, I had a studio set-up inspired by Maryam’s studio. I reflected the figures on it with projection, thus the images went to pieces and new spaces were born. But I often got critics about why works that alternate between two and three dimensions are displayed on a two-dimensional surface.

The collective was founded by Camille Lévêque in the summer of 2014 after long discussions with Lila Khosrovian and Anna Hahoutoff about art networks, visibility, and the difficulty of working alone. For some of us, who were just coming out of education, we were entering the working world without extensive experience, strong portfolios or good professional connections.

When approaching Control Rooms: A Self-critical Introduction to Bager Akbay’s Art Practice and (Fictitious) Essays which focuses on the researches and productions of Bager Akbay who is an artist works and thinks on artificial intelligence and machine learning by using speculative methods and/or methodologies with Mine (Kaplangı), I thought it might be useful to bring the concept of paratext back onto the agenda through photography-text relations.

Seneler önce hiçbir yerde yayınlamaya teşebbüs etmediğim bir öykü yazmıştım; ana karakteri ancak suyun içinde konuşabildiğini farkeden bir yüzücüydü. Bu dilsiz yüzücünün hatırlamaya bir türlü cesaret edemediği aile krizinden aklında kalan tek şey, kavga sırasında duvarda patlayan porselen Japon tabağının kapının arkasına sıçrayan, üzerindeki elle çizilmiş, çivit mavisi süs havuzu deseni nasılsa hala huzurlu bir biçimde akmaya devam eden kırık parçasıydı. Japon yazar, şair, aktör ve vücut geliştirmeci Mishima (d. 1925, Tokyo) ile tanışmam, öykümü okurken bu kapı arkasına sıkışmış süs havuzunu Mishima'yı gönülden sevebileceğime dair bir işaret olarak alan bir arkadaşımın tavsiyesi sayesinde oldu.

As far as I can see, virtual reality technology is a brand new invention which will deepen the transformations brought by the invention of camera and the internet into human history. For now, the most widely used field is the video game industry. Currently, there are many VR playrooms that you can rent by hour in many big districts in Istanbul. Even though those VR goggles, either cheap or expensive ones, are sold on the market today are largely purchased for gaming purposes, I am sure it will change one day in the not-so-distant future.

This text is the transcript of the talk I gave at the invitation of the organisers of the NIDA symposium on photography, held in Nida, Lithuania, September 7th, 2018. It is a reworked version of an earlier talk in which I attempt to think through how photo books are tied up with and in part a product of the particularities of life online in the first half of the 21st century.

When does a drawing turn into an art piece? How does an art piece appear in a museum? When does a person become an artist? What criteria do museums follow while including the art pieces? How is a description included? These and many more questions began to hunt me with a photograph from the exhibition of the “Vav” piece, which was featured in the opening of Odunpazarı Modern Museum (OMM). This essay is a review of my inquiries and humble interpretations.

Electrocardiography means the process of measuring the electrical activity of the heart by using electrodes placed on the skin. So, can the ECG of the earth be measured? Can a photographer manage this like electrodes?

“Icon and Mirror”, Russian photographer Pola Rada’s project, is about an orthodox woman and her social role.

Umut Erbaş is a photographer creating his own image by combining different photography techniques and manipulation methods. The artist who focuses on concepts such as past, death, melancholia, dream, memory, alienated person and earth combines these phenomena with his own bleak, dark language. His work, “On Death”, also began when he realized that the phenomenon of death that he was distant and unfamiliar with got closer with the deaths he witnessed.

Sugar Paper Theories is a murder story by Jack Latham who investigates notions of memory and visual accuracy/perception. The artist uses both his own photography and archival images while documenting one of the perhaps most controversial murder cases in Icelandic history.