Olivo Barbieri: Time Space Geometry

Borusan Contemporary presents Time Space Geometry, the first solo exhibition in Türkiye by Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri. Bringing together works from five major series spanning more than two decades of the artist’s practice—Time Space Geometry, site specific_, The Waterfall Project, Alps − Geographies and People, and Capri—the exhibition explores Barbieri’s distinctive approach to photography and his sustained interest in scale, perspective, landscape, and the perception of place. The exhibition also features a newly commissioned body of work produced for the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, bringing aerial views of nine ancient cities in Türkiye into dialogue with the artist’s wider practice.

For more than four decades, Barbieri has photographed cities, natural environments, and historical sites from above, developing a visual language that unsettles the familiarity of the landscape. Through selective focus and other optical interventions, his images can make vast territories appear miniature, distant, or almost artificial. Scale becomes unstable; architectural structures resemble models, cities become abstract compositions, and natural landscapes acquire the appearance of constructed images. Rather than simply documenting places, Barbieri asks how photography itself shapes the ways in which places are seen, understood, and remembered.

The exhibition unfolds across a remarkably varied geography. The newly commissioned works revisit ancient Anatolian sites including Ephesus, Aphrodisias, Hierapolis, and Laodikeia, bringing archaeological remains into a contemporary visual field where past and present overlap. In the site specific_ series, cities such as Rome, Los Angeles, Brasília, and Istanbul are transformed through the aerial viewpoint into images that hover between documentary reality and visual construction. The Waterfall Project shifts the focus to spectacular natural formations, revealing how waterfalls are not only natural phenomena but also spaces shaped by tourism, infrastructure, and collective ideas of the sublime. Alps − Geographies and People turns to the relationship between human figures and mountainous landscapes, while Capri concludes the exhibition with a dreamlike meditation on one of the Mediterranean’s most culturally saturated environments.

Across these bodies of work, Barbieri repeatedly complicates the distinction between the natural and the constructed, the real and the imagined. A mountain becomes a graphic surface; an ancient theatre becomes a geometric composition; a coastline turns into a stage. His photographs do not offer a stable position from which to observe the world. Instead, they make the act of looking itself visible, revealing how perspective, technology, memory, and cultural associations participate in the construction of a landscape.

The title Time Space Geometry points to this entanglement of temporal and spatial perception. Barbieri’s images compress historical layers and contemporary experience into a single frame, allowing archaeological sites, modern cities, and natural environments to appear simultaneously familiar and strange. The aerial view creates distance, but it can also produce a peculiar intimacy: places become images to be studied, remembered, reconstructed, and imagined.

At Perili Köşk, where contemporary art occupies a building marked by its own architectural and historical layers, Barbieri’s photographs offer a particularly resonant exploration of place. The exhibition asks not only where we are looking from, but what happens to a landscape when it is translated into an image. Do we encounter a place as it is, or as we have learned to see it? Can a photograph preserve a landscape, or does it inevitably transform it? In Time Space Geometry, the act of looking becomes a journey through scale, memory, and representation.

About Borusan Contemporary
Borusan Contemporary is a contemporary art, collection, and education initiative of the Borusan Kocabıyık Foundation. Since 2011, it has presented exhibitions, commissions, events, and educational programs centred on the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection, the only collection in Türkiye to be a member of IACCCA (International Association of Corporate Collections of Contemporary Art), with a particular focus on new media and technology-based artistic practices.