Placeholder
Mert Acar

During my trips to places stuck between the urban and the rural, I discovered—through photography—that these initially inconspicuous landscapes contain within a multi-layered structure regarding the relationship between people and the environment. My work found shape around these trips. I create an approach where the mundane spatiality of daily life in the age of consumerism through an artistic practice made up of deadpan photographs. I focus—within the context of spatial definitions like placelessness, non-places and transitional landscapes—on places, structures, roads and surfaces that are global, that lack an identity, where all traces of the local have been erased; and synthesizes material infrastructures and installation formats that support my approach with the practice of photography. I think this synthesis created via the production of photographic images as both a way of visual expression and a way of thinking.

Placeholder presents us with different locations and traces that point to man’s alteration to terra firma, through Mert’s photography. The photographs allow us to view the artist’s journey; meanwhile, dividing into layers the transformation of the landscape. They reveal the points of convergence and separation between the roads. The artist records, through photography, the means of mankind’s invasion of Earth, and recaptures these hybridized spaces. The series questions a story that transforms and redefines landscapes; in short, a story of humanhood, through the spaces that we inhabit and the way we touch them.*

*Text by Melis Golar from the exhibition of the series

More about Mert Acar