Land And Rocks Weathered By the Sea and Air

Installation view, Land and Rocks Weathered By the Sea and Air, 80x60x8cm

from the cycle Fixing On the Verge of Disappearance, 2024

Land and Rocks Weathered by the Sea and Air raises questions around the reliability and presentation of the spaces surrounding us. The dimly-lit display case takes inspiration from a collection of sun-faded images I encountered in the buffer zone of Cyprus. What first captivated me was the accidental, collaged composition of these generic landscape depictions, each distanced from its original state by a chromatic shift in the ink. What does this material transformation reveal about the relation between the image, the viewer, and the world?

The photographs expose the fragility of spatial and temporal structures from within themselves, revealing the landscapes depicted as unstable and on the verge of dissolution. This instability is politically accentuated by the island’s division through a militarized border zone and, on a personal level, was further heightened by the devastating twin earthquakes that struck southern Türkiye just one day before my arrival. What does it mean to encounter an image of a place when the distance between representation and reality becomes impossible to ignore?