Elipsis Gallery is pleased to announce “Shell”, the second solo show of Serkan Taycan from 20 December until 19 January 2013. In this series Taycan is examining the rapid and constant change of Istanbul throughout the periphery of the city.
In 2007, for the first time ever in world history, the city population outgrew the suburban population. Urban Millennium is a transition point in history and a realization that we should start to examine cities within a new perspective. Taycan photographs these changes and the phenomenons it creates. He looks at the impact of this change and questions the new living spaces presented to us as a result. The mass migration toward Istanbul since the 1950’s, has exposed the city to unplanned urbanization and the constant need for new buildings to accommodate the population which has transformed the city periphery into one massive construction site. This transformation can be witnessed at the urban border in its most vulnerable and raw condition. Sadly, the scene is far from an optimistic one; the environmental sustainability is not taken into account and new development areas are far-off from the dynamics of the city. The carved mine sites, which provide the origins of construction material, are simply transformed into the wounds of the city. Stuck in this vicious cycle of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction, Istanbul is represented as a dystopia in Serkan Taycan’s photographs. He combines different endpoints of the city as diptychs and triptychs whereby merges, time and space, which become personal interventions to the topography. Taycan’s new realities become recent suggestions to the 19th century Istanbul panoramas that are engraved in our memories, and his photographs become an alternative for the current city image.
Parallel to the exhibition, there is an accompanying publication with texts by Jean-François Pérouse and Merve Ünsal, a map of Istanbul periphery by Superpool.
Serkan Taycan (1978) was born in Gaziantep. He studied engineering at Yıldız Technical University, Istanbul. In 2004, he completed a master-class on documentary photography at Nordens Fotoskola, Sweden. He continues his MA in Visual Arts at Sabanci University. His “Homeland” series was exhibitied in Thessaloniki Photo Biennale, Vendome Photography Festival and Niort IPM. In 2010, he participated at the Artist-in-residence program at Niort. In 2010, he was commissioned for the exhibition & book; “Ex:change, Istanbul – Marseille”. He has been shortlisted for the FullArt Prize-2012. He is a member RecCollective and currently lives and works in Istanbul.
The main theme of his works is the ever-changing relationship between urban and rural spaces, and the people who are affected by these processes of transformation.