23 Jan - 02 Mar 2014
SURFACE PHENOMENA / ALİ TAPTIK / 23.01.2014 - 02.03.2014 / THE EMPIRE PROJECT
Ali Taptık's new series "Surface Phenomena", is in essence a continuation of his prior series "Kaza ve Kader" and "Nothing Surprising", this latest body of work will premier at The Empire Project on January 23rd 2014.
"Surface Phenomena" is a fragmented narrative bringing together such diverse themes as technology, sustenance and flora along with a near bibliophiles documentation various books. Technically speaking the works themselves in the new series are comprised of a selection of Taptık's high definition photographs to low resolution visual constellation, as well as the artist's own and cited texts.
ALİ TAPTIK
Ali Taptık was born in 1983, in Istanbul where he continues to live & work. Taptik graduated from the Faculty of Architecture at Istanbul Technical University and is an autodidact photographer. He continued his education in Architecture in ITU with master's thesis in the History of Architecture with a focus on History of Photography and Representation of City. He is currently a Phd candidate at ITU.
His second series "Kaza ve Kader" (Accident and Fate) is "about interconnected frames of the experience of accumulated urban realities, it is about the relationships, places, people, emotions and coincidences"*. This series could be considered his initial journey to blurring the lines between the simulacra and the written word, questing for a new hybrid where the images come together to go beyond some didactic document and make a play for prose.
A narrative where the relationship between the intimate and the social is one of the key elements. "Kaza ve Kader" was published by Filigranes Editions, France in November 2009. With "Familiar Strangers", a series about the urban structure and the relationship of the subjects of the city with their environment Taptik continued on his work on his hometown. "Nothing Surprising", the second volume in the series of "novels" that started with "Kaza ve Kader". "Nothing Surprising" centers itself around the theme of crisis and resistance in urban context.
Taptık also collaborated with Prof. Dr. Uğur Tanyeli and Bulent Erkmen on the double book Istanbul'u Resmetmek - Türkiye' nin Görsellik Tarihine Giriş (Depicting Istanbul - Introduction to History of Visuality in Turkey). He is one of the founding members of Istanbul based Publisher's Collective Bandrolsuz (www.bandrolsuz.org)
Current areas of interest is relationship between literature and visuality (cinematic adaptation of novels and short stories), publishing as artistic production, new methods for diffusion and distribution of creative production.
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