Agora is the last piece in a trilogy of photographic series. The trilogy starts from the rural areas with Habitat, moves into the peripheral suburbs with Shell and at the end reaches the city squares, thus the centre of the city.

PİLOT Gallery is hosting Serkan Taycan’s solo exhibition Agora between 26 May and 4 July. The Agora series, which was part of the Pavilion of Turkey at the last International Architecture Exhibition of Venice Biennale traces the collective memory through the squares of Istanbul. The photographs are shown in Istanbul for the first time.

Agora is the last piece in a trilogy of photographic series the artist has been working on since 2008. The trilogy starts from the rural areas with Habitat, moves into the peripheral suburbs with Shell and at the end reaches the city squares, thus the centre of the city. Taycan aims at constructing a narrative on the urbanization in relation to the geographical terrain he lives in. The walking trail that he proposes in his ongoing project Between Two Seas – supported by the 13th Istanbul Biennial – allows one to experience physically the periphery of the city that he photographed in the Shell series as well as the environmental change the area has been subject to. Serkan Taycan brings these several works together under the title Fault Line, a multi-layered project that intends to question, trace and record the social and political transformation the region was undergoing over the last decade.

Previously focusing on rural areas for his series Habitat and on periphery for Shell, Serkan Taycan now looks at the squares as the places embodying personal and collective memory. He observes these public places that are microcosms of the urban life in order to explore the differences, similarities and the struggle -implicit or not- within the heterogenous city. In other words, he makes a comparative study of squares.

After his studies of engineering, Serkan Taycan completed a master-class on documentary photography at Nordens Fotoskola, Sweden. He completed his MA degree in Visual Arts at Sabancı University, Istanbul and in Photography at Aalto University, Helsinki. He concentrates on the ever-changing relationship between urban and rural spaces, consequences of these changes and the people who are affected by these processes of transformation. He works primarily with photography and maps, also engages with walking. His work has been exhibited in various biennials and venues, among which: Venice Architectural Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Sinop Biennial, Helsinki Photography Biennial, and Thessaloniki Photography Biennale as well as Photographic Center Northwest Seattle, Malmö Museum and St.Petersburg Russian National Centre of Photography. Taycan is a member of RecCollective. He lives and works in Istanbul.

Image: Agora #01, #03, #04, #06, (detail) 2014, Archival pigment print, acrylic face-mount on aluminium composite panel, 150 x 185 cm (each)

Opening: Thuersday 26 May 2015 6pm.

Pilot Gallery
Sıraselviler Caddesi No.83/2
Istanbul
Tue – Sat 10:30am to 6:30pm

SERKAN TAYCAN
dal 26 maggio al 4 luglio 2015