Continuum
Photobook, Installation
A Found Deep Space Image from ESO SDSS-II, Archival Pigment Print, Photographic Compositions between Glass, Various Dimensions
2015
Presented at Istanbul’s Tophane-i Amire Cistern Galleries from October 11 to 30, 2015, Continuum explores the dissonance between human and cosmic temporalities through a tripartite installation. The project interweaves photographic documentation of daily life with manipulated astronomical imagery, framing time as a malleable construct shaped by perception, materiality, and scale. Central to the work is the tension between photography’s role as a fixed record and its capacity to destabilize linear narratives.
A photobook forms the terrestrial axis of the installation, its pages filled with uncaptioned urban vignettes, transient landscapes, and anonymous portraits. Devoid of chronological sequencing, its pages mirror the fragmented nature of lived experience, where moments accumulate without hierarchy. The book’s tactile format—portable, intimate, and bound—contrasts with its thematic focus on transience, underscoring the paradox of preserving ephemeral instants through a medium itself subject to decay.
Contrasting this intimate terrestrial archive, a folded image from the European Space Agency’s SDSS-II survey reconfigures cosmic temporality into tactile form. The photograph is folded into a three-dimensional object, its creases evoking the curvature of spacetime. This print-error manipulation transforms the image from a distant astronomical record into a tactile artifact, collapsing eons of celestial time into a single encounter. The folds resist full legibility, echoing the limits of human comprehension when confronting cosmic scales.
Between these extremes, glass-encased photographic compositions mediate the dialogue. Enlarged to mirror the photobook’s layouts, suspended in transparent layers, they fracture under ambient light, their overlapping planes shifting with the viewer’s movement. The glass—simultaneously fragile and reflective—transforms static photographs into dynamic fields where perspective dictates meaning. This instability mirrors the subjectivity of memory, challenging photography’s presumed objectivity.
The installation’s spatial dynamics amplify its conceptual framework. The cistern’s arched ceilings and subterranean acoustics create an immersive environment where sound and light modulate perception. Curved surfaces resonate with the folded astronomical image, drawing formal parallels between cosmic geometry and built spaces. By avoiding explicit historical references, the work universalizes its inquiry, framing time as a continuum unbound by epoch or location.
Through its interplay of terrestrial and cosmic imagery, Continuum proposes that temporality is not a linear progression but a layered phenomenon. The photobook’s fractured present, the deep space’s unresolved potential, and the glass compositions’ perceptual variability collectively reject fixed narratives. Instead, they position time as a relational force—shaped by the interplay of observation, material decay, and scale.
Photography, here, becomes a medium of both documentation and distortion. Whether capturing a street scene or a deep space, images are revealed as unstable markers, their meanings contingent on context, medium, and the viewer’s position within the continuum.
