On the Road by Kezban Arca Batıbeki
Kezban Arca Batıbeki’s photographs revisit travel, memory and lockdown through a collector’s eye.
Kezban Arca Batıbeki acts like a collector in her artistic practice. She transforms her inner world and intellectual atmosphere into works of art using the objects she has collected. Thousands of objects transform her art house and studio into a meaningful semiotic treasure like the rare 16th century cabinets.
The use of objects and images is not only limited to a visual meaning, but also carries a social, cultural and personal depth. Although the artist's work circulates in the social discourse, it always represents his own subjectivity, even privacy. The objects present the viewer with a scene of symbols and allegories, creating a grand mise-en-scene that keeps the memory of his art alive. The works address contemporary social and cultural issues from a post-modernist perspective, while touching on the gap created by modernity regarding memory and identity.
Using pop-art aesthetics and integrating the imagery of consumer society into his unique narrative, Batıbeki's art acquires a broad social meaning. This approach allows art to play an important role in social discourse in an age when the distinction between high and popular culture is blurred and the distinctions of everyday life are erased.
Batıbeki's art bridges her personal mythology with her social and cultural experiences, offering viewers the opportunity for deep reflection and emotional connection. Each work takes the viewer on a journey that transcends the boundaries of time and space. The images that substitute on this path manifest themselves as temporal forms. Each image opens a path to discover the scent of time and invites the viewer to wander through it.
Since the beginning, the nature of photography has been baffling. Photography is science, technology, testimony, observation, magic, a sense of belonging, imitation, nostalgia, creative expression, a source of news, truth, and a form of art. No matter what we embrace, glorify, abrade, or reject about it, is there another medium that accommodates such a variety of functions by its very nature? Nevertheless, the simplicity of the photographic world can contain the complexity of human nature and create an altered consciousness, because the primary approach to a photograph is through emotion. A photograph can evoke our most intense, fragile, unexpected, or ferocious reactions. We look at photographs to encounter reflections of cruelty, grotesqueness, beauty, misery, love, nature, artistic creation, and immoral violence. As John Berger describes photography as proof of the existing world, it is also a means of making sense of the world and exploring textures and wholeness beyond us.
Kezban Arca Batıbeki employs photography, in line with her mythology and unique artistic approach, as an intuitive encounter with the world. From painting to installation, from short film to photography, ordinary images in her work transform into symbolic icons. Photo novels, record albums, magazines, trinkets, shiny objects, glamorous outfits, and other recurring elements form the core of her artistic language. This distinctive aesthetic functions as an envoi that delivers an unexpected depth of critical thought. Everything contemporary and popular appears ordinary when serving its basic function. Yet once it becomes an indicator, it turns into sensation. Objects, figures, and places in Batıbeki’s work emerge as signs of her interaction with culture and society.
We are passing through a period in which place and time are defined as now and here. As our pace toward the future slows, memories revive, and we collectively and individually experience a form of shutdown. These conditions closely reflect the photographic scenes created by Batıbeki, some of which were produced during the epidemic and shaped by her visual archaeology. If accumulating photographs means accumulating the world, the artist reinterprets the images she has gathered over the years by manipulating them and transforming them into cinematographic digital collages. Nothing in these compositions is random. Each image represents a specific insight rather than a simple arrangement.
Batıbeki’s journeys from New York to Bologna, from St. Petersburg to Paris, and from Edirne to Matera appear as mementos within her works. Yet if a journey is a method of making sense of the world, her journeys are neither metaphors of esoteric enlightenment nor codes that impose emotional or figurative participation. Memory functions less as a record of what truly happened and more as an interpretation and renewal of experience. The aim of Batıbeki’s photography is to create a direct encounter with time and place, echoing the deep relationship between memory and temporality. A peacock at a crossroads, one of her signature female figures waiting in a glamorous hotel lobby or room, dancers in a cabaret scene, or mysterious figures standing in a frozen street all present fleeting moments of glamour that enable the reinvention of long forgotten time.
Today’s crisis of time, defined by constant activity, mobility, and enforced acceleration, gradually extinguishes our ability to remain still. Reality, as a temporal phenomenon, is reconstructed in art through stabilization, superimposition, and compression of events, facts, and images. Batıbeki’s hybrid cinematographic scenes, formed through documentary traces, photography, and collage, create an intermediate space between impression and memory. Along the winding paths of remembrance, time connects with a continuous present without aging or disappearing into the past. Although every photograph may be read as a memento mori in a world where human beings exist as walkers, the artist opens a path that allows us to drift through the present and rediscover the scent of time.
Derya Yücel August 2020, Istanbul
