YETKIN BASARIR

FAÇAYI BOZMA (Keep your facade right)

The two series of photographs of Yetkin Basarir are concerned with similar issues. In the first “Through”, the viewer is treated to views of the underside of cars, shot from the ground level with a flash light, and in the second “Play-2”, views from the third of fourth floor of an apartment building straight down to the back yard with a zoom equipped camera. Both series are rendered in black and white. We look at what is not looked at, not exactly because we turn our heads away from it, but because the very vista Basarir selects evades our day-to-day sight line.

What is the underside of a car other than a willing gatherer of the dirt and grime of the street? Would we ever bend over and look under if not for an unexpected problem? In Basarir's constellation of photographs the cool machismo of the car and the beauty and seduction of its curves is replaced by something that looks like an ancient industrial operation, something that resembles an old cement factory enveloped in its own dust. What we look at is not the car unseen; it is altogether something else.

Basarir's strange photographs taken from the apartment building recall and reframe a precise Istanbul situation. I would often be shocked to see the backyards of buildings in Europe . The way they were organized in pristine condition made them no different from their front views. Or, to the contrary, the backs of New York buildings looked like the building's bowels. In Basarir's images, the rear-by default the horizontal shot vertically-represents what the occupants of the buildings agree not to see. It is a place where function and reason fall apart. The folly of adults throwing around paper airplanes in the photographs indicates no sign of joy. All looks awkward. These spaces are often territorialized by the doorman's family in an ultimately ad hoc style or temporary units collated to each other. These almost-buildings are tolerated by the tenants of building. The tenants do not look, or better yet, they do not see. These spaces are mostly found in the rather old and established urban zones in Istanbul where the facades often look quite clean and ordered.

Basarir asks us to become an observer of what we see, not simply to look.

(Vasif Kortun)