Judges
JUDGE CHOICE
Courtesy of Işık Kaya
Işık Kaya
I??k Kaya is a lens-based media artist whose practice explores the ways in which humans shape the contemporary landscape. Her projects focus on traces of economic infrastructures to examine politics in built environments and how man's dominance over nature finds its manifestation in everyday architecture. In her work, she creates dense compilations of industrial fragments to construct new landscapes that look both alien and familiar at the same time. By framing her subjects exclusively at night, she aims to accentuate the artificial and uncanny qualities of urban environments.
I??k's interest in man-made landscapes started after living in Istanbul during its construction boom. Witnessing how ideology and power can shape urban landscapes, change everyday life, and disrupt the environment made her look more critically at infrastructures and the ideologies behind them. Through her work, she intends to make overlooked everyday structures that affect our lives and future more visible and create moments of reflection on how we can reshape our relationship with nature.
I??k Kaya holds an MFA degree in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA degree in Photography & Videography from Istanbul Bilgi University, where she studied with a full scholarship.
She has participated in exhibitions at Die Digitale Dusseldorf (Germany), Kunsthalle Darmstadt (Germany), Royal Geographic Society (UK), CEAAC (France), Galerie de LEscale (France), CICA Museum (Korea), and San Diego Art Institute ICA San Diego (USA) among others.
Second Nature
For centuries, humans have extracted more and more resources from forests, the soil, and the oceans across the planet in the name of growth.
Climate change is perhaps the most dramatic consequence of an attitude toward nature that is characterized by arrogance. This attitude is shaped by the belief that humans stand outside of nature and have it at their disposal. Appropriation and imitation are cultural consequences of this belief, and so it should come as no surprise that, since the 1990s, radio masts have been disguised as trees. The photographs in the "Second Nature" series show the sometimes bizarre structures as part of the Southern California landscape and how man has constructed his own technological dystopia that seems unreal and uninhabitable.
The man-made environment of plastic, metal, and cement satisfies needs in the short term but is toxic and unsustainable in the long run. Mobile technology and the ubiquitous Internet have become our second nature, and as long as we design our built environment at the expense of the first nature, climate crises would be inevitable.