In/Through the Belly of the Sky

Organizing Photography with a Non-Representational Gaze

Kaan Kemal Öner’s exhibition In/Through the Belly of the Sky is based on his processual photographs taken across different places such as Cambodia, Thailand, Iceland, South Africa, Normandy and Mazı Village in Turkey. Persistence, repetition and endless experimentation are inherent in Öner’s artistic practice. His works are based not only on conveying the image, but also on apperceiving and implementing the processual character of the act of making. In his exhibition In/Through the Belly of the Sky, a selection of Öner’s seven-year production has been site-specifically produced at Quick Art Space.

Using printing techniques such as Kallitype, Cyanotype, Vandyke, Platinum Palladium, Silver Gelatin, Gumoil, Mordançage as part of the act of making photographs, Öner’s photographs bear the traces of chemical reactions, errors, various environmental effects such as wind and dust rather than the digitally provided perfect image. The photographs, subjected to distortions and various interventions, are sometimes based on Öner’s drawings on them, sometimes his overlapping and/or appropriation of the found photographs, and other times, non-human matter is given space to reveal its own potential.

The fact that all these techniques date back to the nineteenth century reminds us of the historicity of photography by creating networks that connect the past to the present. The state of re-sensation revealed through these networks inevitably arouses uncanny, ambiguous and vague feelings. This situation bears similarity to the transcendental expression that nineteenth-century Romanticism tried to reveal with its sublime insight. The elements of nature that evoke in the viewer feelings of fear and awe due to their dimensions...

The act of keeping records is realized through the involvement of a non-representational gaze. The gaze has existed since the beginning of the history of photography. So what is meant by the non-representational gaze? There is an act of (re)seeing here, inherent in posthuman epistemology. A gaze that adds the concept to the process and is capable of making visible the relations between the human and non-human. Then what does it mean to involve the non-human in the practice of photography? Does including non-humans in the process consist of visualizing them as images per se? Although making animals, plants, objects, organics and inorganics visible in the image has an important place in posthuman thought, the act of making photographs is also a part of the articulation in question.

Like his contemporaries who deal with photography conceptually, Öner prefers to depart from the (passive) position of taking the photograph towards the (active) position of making it. A return to the primals of photography by adding layers of matter to the process may be possible with the reuse of old techniques. Of course, the reuse of old techniques cannot be the sole element sought in a non-representational gaze. However, the artist’s manipulation of the chemical processes related to the primals of photography is an important step towards giving photography an organic integrity. In this way, the artist’s gesture becomes palpable. Photography thus begins to assume a position that mobilizes different emotions. While the relationship between the artist and the work requires the artist to master the knowledge and technique of the material, such mastery also prevents the artist’s alienation from his work.

This type of a “comeback” is an integral part of Öner’s art practice. The materials and techniques he uses emerge as the act of photograph-making and lead to the re-sensation of the artist’s gesture. It is undeniable that what photography is today is more than a linear “progress”, but rather a retrogression. However, such retrogressions do not mean excluding digital possibilities at large, they can only be achieved by re-establishing the balance between the digital and the non-digital. In this way, a better ethical-ontological-epistemological approach can be achieved in which one does not exclude the other. This is why the exhibition In/Through the Belly of the Sky includes works produced with old techniques as well as digital and video.

The technical recall in the exhibition also applies to the reception of landscape painting. Öner’s imagery inherent in landscape painting presents unmanned views, reminiscent of the landscape paintings of Romanticism. In the landscape views with no human beings in sight, elements of nature stand out that sometimes outperform human beings in scale. When the size of mountains, stones, rocks and trees are compared to humans, they create a contrast in terms of scale. The indistinct, small human silhouettes that emerge as a conscious choice of scaling remind us of the landscapes of the Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. The color palette, revealed by the reinterpretation of old techniques, also accompanies this non-linear historic rupture. Deconstructed images of cathedrals, pixelated shrines, temples and the color fields of all these images...

Large-scale images of nature, which we can describe as mathematical sublime, continue in the columns of the space. With the effect of both scaling and the angle taken, trees, branches and stones cause changes in the viewer’s vision. This change is related to the fact that non-human forms become increasingly embodied. These images make the viewer feel the presence of human in an unmanned nature.

The addition of the non-representational gaze and theory in the process depends on the expansion and/or visibility of what makes photography an art object (layers of matter). With In/Through the Belly of the Sky, Kaan Kemal Öner presents a trace of the conceptual process that involves the restructuring of photography today.

Uras Kızıl

Translation: Zeynep Nur Ayanoğlu