09 Nov - 15 Dec 2018
Emin Altan's Chaosmos project, which he started in 2012, was a search for confrontation
with a dystopian fiction created on the basis of subjective perception and personal
observations, far from being a documentary, focused on the traces of the post-industrial
revolution crisis and eventual collapse.
It was a work seeking the traces of a process in which the desire to dominate nature and the
"other" without any restrictions, the alienation of man, who is alienated from his labour,
alienates himself along with the nature he is a part of, and ultimately destroys his own
species. Chaosmos also contained Narcissus. With a slightly different reading, it could be said
that man's admiration for what he produces will lead to his own end.
Chaosmos was a work in which existence today is almost associated with the concept of
growth, the process of producing more, consuming more and even reproducing more as a
result of competitive policies is a process of being stuck and rapidly bringing the end of
nature and humanity, and the photographs taken were considered as a reflection of this
absolute end predicted today.
Lasting until 2017 and extending to twenty-five countries, the photographs taken during this
round-the-world process were used to show the deserted Lake Aral as a result of the
agricultural policies implemented in Kazakhstan, Detroit, which has turned into a ghost city
as a result of the inability of the automotive industry in the USA to resist the competitive
world markets, and Iwate coal mines in Japan, which have been abandoned due to global
competition, The work has been a search for the remnants of the nuclear disasters in
Ukraine, Chernobyl and Fukushhima in Japan, the traces of the Cold War in the Balkans and
the former Yugoslavia, the mental hospitals in Northern Italy that were closed as a result of
the reactions against human rights violations, and many other areas.
Another characteristic of the selected locations is that many of them bear the traces of the
developments in Altan's childhood years (late 60s, early 70s), a time when the future was
looked at with hope.
Designed by Bülent Erkmen, Chaosmos was published by Norgunk in 2018.
