Alpin Arda Bağcık Türkiye, b. 1988

Alpin Arda Bağcık (b. 1988, Turkey) probes the fragile boundaries between truth, image, and belief within his practice. His works often investigate the production of knowledge within media and images; questioning the difference between truth and reality. Bağcık sees the two concepts not just antithesis of each other, but as a kin of one another. Through a critical lens, he investigates how knowledge is produced and distorted, particularly within the vast, anesthetizing circulation of media imagery.

His work examines the mechanisms of archiving through which collective perception is shaped by myths, propaganda, and conspiracy theories, emphasizing the dual role of visual culture as both a record and a tool of influence. Drawing a parallel between the numbing effects of mass media and the anesthetizing qualities of pharmaceuticals, Bağcık titles many of his works after neurological medications.

Working predominantly on painting, Bağcık continues to preserve the intricate narrative force of the medium by depicting and recontextualizing archival photographs depicting familiar figures, world leaders, cultural icons, and emblematic events, into ambiguous narratives that oscillate between fact and fiction. The veil that separates the real and the fictional, is particularly thin in Bağcık’s paintings. In his lifelike paintings, portraying moments reminiscent of cultural standpoints, Bağcık invokes our memory by introducing subtle ambiguities with nuanced changes to documented and well known images. Bağcık’s predominantly black and white paintings suggest the transient nature of memory and the porous boundary between authenticity and invention. Rather than framing reality as a binary opposition, his black and white paintings reveal it as a spectrum; one composed of innumerable shifting tones, interpretations, and possibilities.