Kerem Ozan Bayraktar: Rocks and Winds, Germs and Words

Curated by Kevser Güler

How to determine that an entity is a living being, how to conceive its forms of interaction with its environment? Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, in his solo exhibition Rocks and Winds, Germs and Words, deals with concepts of living as a network of relations in which matter and animate beings, the natural and the artefact, life and death are dynamically intertwined. In this exhibition, centered around his work titled Great Oxidation Event (2019) focusing on historical relations of oxygen on earth and depicting them with illustrations, images, infographics, texts, and symbols, the artist uses ecology as a metaphor, posing questions and suggestions on relations between dynamic systems and ways of representing them.

In Rocks and Winds, Germs and Words Kerem presents a materialistic foundation of definitions, fluxes, relations between animate-inanimate matter on earth, and in this context, the possibilities of art production. He offers a proposal of forms that conceives matter as an active agent, that suggests thinking by first eliminating the nature-culture duality, and that problematizes anthropocentric or life-centric concepts of existence. The artist, focusing on diversity, variation, and complexity, and images of motion, transformation, and flux that make them possible, draws attention to the transformative potential of the image and questions the state of the digital image today, while looking at the transformation and temporality of beings.

The title Rocks and Winds, Germs and Words is borrowed from a sentence in Manuel de Landa’s A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, a text that has inspired Kerem in his recent work. It defines matter as an active agent and suggests reflecting on nature-culture relations starting with defying this dichotomy itself, and problematizes anthropomorphic ontologies.

A book including images of works by Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, texts by the curator of the exhibition Kevser Güler, philosopher Gaye Çankaya Eksen, and artist Sergen Şehitoğlu, as well as a poem of poet Asuman Susam, designed by Dilara Sezgin, accompanies the exhibition.

Rocks and Winds, Germs and Words invites the visitor to turn towards the uncontainable, fluid, materialistic, relational complexity, multiplicity, and diversity of life and to rethink the enchantment of existence in and through a new materialistic conception of beings.

Kerem Ozan Bayraktar (1984) lives and works in Istanbul. He mainly uses animations, 3D computer renders, scaled models, and texts, and carries out research and works focusing on change, mutation, diversity, and copying. He reproduces and depicts the boundaries, loops, and interactions between artificial and natural systems in the context of a wide research area ranging from planet morphologies to urban plants. Bayraktar completed his MFA and PhD in Marmara University Fine Arts Institute with two theses on “Systems Theory” and “Digital Image”. His works have been shown in many publications, video screenings and group shows. Kerem Ozan Bayraktar is currently participating in Berlin Senate Residency Program between July-December 2019.

Rocks and Winds, Germs and Words unfolds in and through questions about motion and stillness, the animate and inanimate, the natural and the artefact, digital image in relation to the issues of representation, data and information. Kerem suggests a perspective that reclaims the diverse agencies of life, earth, technology and media in the co-evolution processes, their potential to be affected and to affect, and proposes exploring the terrible beauties of these complex interactions with joy.