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 Disappearing, 2024

Fixing on The Verge of Disappearance is an ongoing work cycle that explores the disintegration of images due to processes of decay.

The project particularly emphasizes photographic and print images that turn blue after prolonged exposure to the sun, with the color shift occurring due to the breakdown of other pigments in the ink. This photographic installation project emerged from my time working in the photographic archive of the German Archaeology Institute in Istanbul, where I explored the tension between the vastness of preserved history and the fleeting nature of images that I am interested in.

The works within the cycle differ in their form, depending on the found source material and souvenirs that I bring together. The project follows a logic of collecting, sorting, archiving and reviving images and objects, raising questions about how they exist in our surroundings and how we in return grapple with their disappearance. This dissolution is intrinsically linked to broader issues of preservation, history, and memory – and the fragility of these things. The tension of what we consider as enduring or ephemeral is an ongoing theme in my work. I approach the embodied research around Fixing on The Verge of Disappearance with two main questions:

Where does memory end, and the archive begin? And how to fix the thing which is on the verge to disappear?