Text by Sara Poli
All Images © Cemil Batur Gökçeer
Cemil Batur Gökçeer (1981, Ankara) is an artist based in Istanbul. His solo exhibitions include Düğüm (2012), En Yakın İhtimal (2014), Parazit (2015), and Şşt (2016). He has self-published the books Düğüm (2017) and Mağara Albino (2019). His ongoing project, Thin Air, was recently showcased at the 2024 Discovery Awards section of the Rencontres d’Arles festival, curated by Audrey Illouz. Gökçeer is a co-founder of the artist space Torun (2012–2019).
Disasters are sometimes synchronic. What happens within a personal story creates substrates of memories that form a landscape of consciousness, a codification of pain that becomes like a melting pot of a time that now seems ancient. It creates, then, a landscape of perception of a transcendental theory that integrates cultural aspects: a scenario of codification, a necessary hook to be able to hold up the disaster because somehow we do not want it to go away, we want to see it at a wide range, to grasp it fully in the distant flicker of blue sky. Disaster is a landscape.
Cemil Batur Gökçeer’s Thin Air project speaks of inner substrates, ctonic worlds that are transformed into ambiguous, precisely philo-landscape images. What could be more ambiguous than a landscape? A word-element that embraces a vast repertoire of elements containing infinitesimal worlds: landscape is a container. Cemil’s landscape is not a contemplative one; he moves through natural disasters, sacred areas or places of personal significance. He starts with a place – it may be an extinct volcano, a sacred mountain in Anatolia, his grandmother’s garden, a forest fire, the aftermath of an earthquake – and forms what is the visual grammar and mapping of the work in its different stages. The Thin Air propagated in three distinct acts: the first, “Separation”, shows desaturated, black-and-white images where the viewfinder accommodates photographs without apparent subject matter, seeming to follow a logic of a naked, uncompromising gaze, it is a silent but wounded nature. The second and third acts, “Heart Stone” and “Arap”, are developed with a more experimental process, following the triple exposure technique. As a result of complicated inner motions, the artist comes to take photographs in significant places where the image is not pre-visualized as it usually happens: being overlaid in film the newly produced visual content is not under the author’s control, as if his practice connects deeply with the unpredictability of the nature that he portrays in his layered photographs. This methodology of work is illustrated as a topography of time, where he does not use the subjects for the construction of the image: the subjects are constructed at the very time of the photograph.
The artist illustrates how much caffeomancy matches his creative practice, “It’s like reading coffee grounds, it’s unpredictable, but it still generates an image.” Cemil told me in our video call, “[…] the meta-temporal unpredictability of my art practice is connected with this particular reading.” The coffee, whose beans come from the land so much portrayed by Cemil in his images, creates a meta-earthly connection that contrasts with the necessary unpredictability of analog photography. The organicity that connects the divination of coffee with the practice of photography is precisely the demand for a certain image, a matter that is transformed to weave a truth, a future that is already present in the photograph – though taken in the past – but above all, the act of interpretation. The author’s photographs contain different times and places, parallel to the natural landscapes and therefore, are not instantaneously decipherable: the coordinates of these photographs are haphazard and follow emotional inner roads where the destination appears unknown. The typical landscape stability in this work steps aside, leaving room for trajectories for which no evidence is provided. Cemil’s images thus appear to us as stagnant landscapes, compressed but insubstantial images like air: the name “Thin air,” in fact, also connects to a similar Turkish linguistic version, “Uzun hava” translated as “Long air” revealing to us an atmospheric but also musical and cultural correlation between the two terms. It is the act of looking that comes first, for before we feel something must see, capture, and observe: this is what Cemil has done in this work, capturing time like a fisherman of images, formulating atmospheric poems whose place is far from even the obligatory photographic time. With this layered gesture, Cemil Batur Gökçeer eliminates the instant of the photograph, taking us to courtly climates and temperatures, whose weather condition takes on semblances of the sacred.
