Perfection in Natural Moments: Ali Bilge Akkaya
The power of Ali Bilge Akkaya’s photographs originates from a balance nourished by contrast, from a simple yet inviting compositional mentality skilfully camouflaging its multiple layers of meaning at first sight. The natural, everyday life portraits suddenly appearing amidst perfectly proportioned geometric structures reminiscent of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man simultaneously accommodate the artist’s passion for formal perfection and his intuitive, accidental attitude towards capturing the magic in the moment. For Akkaya, photography is an openended narrative, substituting the verbal and written language and leaving room for various interpretations. The artist - carefully avoiding staged fiction while not compromising balance and symmetry - aims at toppling the viewer’s spatial perception, rendering familiar places unrecognizable, making him curious, pulling him into the main story to take him to a journey through plural layers, and asks him to complete the story on his own. The photographs, not self-revealing, are loaded with references belonging to a broad intellectual universe, ranging from individual-society relationship to the question of identity, from political criticism to ontology. These concepts Akkaya makes us anticipate without direct confrontation become words inhabiting the work, available to every individual to arrange in different ways in building his own sentences. The element of contrast is not only evident in form and content, but also in light and color. The dualities like light and dark, red and green are used in a way to augment the compositional tension and thus facilitate the first step into the narrative. On the other hand, the series arranged by the artist either on different planes or on the same horizontal line are closely related with the moving image. These groups of works, reminiscent of a silent film’s frames, generously reveal Akkaya’s enthusiasm in telling people’s story to the people.
İpek Yeğinsü, 2014
The power of Ali Bilge Akkaya’s photographs originates from a balance nourished by contrast, from a simple yet inviting compositional mentality skilfully camouflaging its multiple layers of meaning at first sight. The natural, everyday life portraits suddenly appearing amidst perfectly proportioned geometric structures reminiscent of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man simultaneously accommodate the artist’s passion for formal perfection and his intuitive, accidental attitude towards capturing the magic in the moment. For Akkaya, photography is an openended narrative, substituting the verbal and written language and leaving room for various interpretations. The artist - carefully avoiding staged fiction while not compromising balance and symmetry - aims at toppling the viewer’s spatial perception, rendering familiar places unrecognizable, making him curious, pulling him into the main story to take him to a journey through plural layers, and asks him to complete the story on his own. The photographs, not self-revealing, are loaded with references belonging to a broad intellectual universe, ranging from individual-society relationship to the question of identity, from political criticism to ontology. These concepts Akkaya makes us anticipate without direct confrontation become words inhabiting the work, available to every individual to arrange in different ways in building his own sentences. The element of contrast is not only evident in form and content, but also in light and color. The dualities like light and dark, red and green are used in a way to augment the compositional tension and thus facilitate the first step into the narrative. On the other hand, the series arranged by the artist either on different planes or on the same horizontal line are closely related with the moving image. These groups of works, reminiscent of a silent film’s frames, generously reveal Akkaya’s enthusiasm in telling people’s story to the people.
İpek Yeğinsü, 2014