Press Release - Ground Glass

08/01/2016 - 19/03/2016


Galeri Zilberman is pleased to announce the exhibition by Ahmet Elhan, titled “Ground Glass”. The artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, can be visited at the main gallery space between 9 January and 19 March.

In Ground Glass, the artist focuses on photography's own tradition and the notion of mastery. Creating this new exhibition with an artistic sensitivity towards visual exuberance in today's world, he proposes an alternative perspective against the manipulation of the hastily produced and consumed digital photography, and how it conceals the truth photographically.

In his previous works, Elhan used to break down the exhibition space into its time-intervals, leading to a novel perception and experience of the space. In one of this series, called Time/Space, he divided structures into thousands of different moments and put them back together to transitionally transform them, while in his exhibition Composed in 2013, he superimposed hodiernal figures and 18th century gravures that depict the Ottoman indoors, highlighting the bigger temporal refractions with the use of platinum-palladium print. The figures also overlapped in these works, defining a most transitive, ambiguous gap through new forms, which were not only timeless and spaceless, but also genderless.

Switching his focus from the space to the figure during the process, Elhan this time points his camera to nature and pursues the plain one, the one that's there, giving references to the craft and history of photography. He reminds that in today's visual chaos, a different approach is possible. The works at the exhibition show resistance to today's reflex of creating hastily with digital photography, by using landscape and nature photography's characteristic of producing images in a long period of time as a call to reflect on photography, thus emphasising the value of stopping and planning the shots over producing without thinking.

Elhan ensures that his nature photographs are evaluated analytically by adding lines on their ground glasses, thus drawing attention to the subject of composition. In this way, he also underlines the issue of photography being the proof or reflection of truth, advising the audience not to believe what they see with their eyes and invites them to spend time in front of the Ground Glass and think about what photography could offer as a material.

Ahmet Elhan (1959, İzmir): After completing his undergraduate degree at Marmara University's Graphic Design Department, he went on to graduate from the Cinema-TV Department at Dokuz Eylül University. As well as participating in many national and international group exhibitions, he has opened fourteen solo exhibitions to date. His works are part of many important corporate and private collections both in Turkey and abroad. He lives and works in Istanbul.



Artist Pages
  - Ahmet Elhan

Exhibition Works