‘Cubby Hole’ is the series that consist of Sergen Şehitoğlu’s pieces that will be exhibited for the first time. The series emphasizes how contractionary, disconnected and imprisoned our daily lives are; despite they have been grounded on idealist vision of modernism at first place. ‘Cubby Hole’ transforms insisted modern big city life paths into sophisticated and multilayered images.
People get off the house; take air-conditioned cars; pass to offices in plazas; spend our time in shopping malls to be entertained or socialize. This vortex that anybody cannot escape and drift from one cube to another, is actually a fiction created by capitalism and modernism to control people. Sergen Şehitoğlu traces world’s isolated individuals, where people break off other people and nature, via his photography in the series of ‘Cubby Hole’. Without any digital manipulation, the artist locks the imprisoned individual again and again with repeated horizontal and vertical lines in almost kaleidoscopic images.
How this life style, that we already accepted its rules, is against to our nature is the point that is highlighted in the series of ‘Cubby Hole’. As Kurt Vonnegut says, “I tell you, we are here on earth to fart around; and don’t let anybody tell you different’. Three photographs from the artist’s one of the latest series of ‘Defragment’, present sequences of a different world that illustrate the confinement issue. These fragmented photographs, which include people escaped from the cage and joined life, introduces pluralistic perspectives in a stylistic way.
In these works, which are produced by dividing a single photograpgh into pieces and re-gather together, a more humanist world is illustrated rather than a place where people are voluntarily imprisoned. Individuals doing physical activities such as running and cycling belongs to a world which has not controlled by the distopia yet. In spite of sustaining the fragmentation idea, these three photographs generate a breathable space among depressing cubby holes in both context and composition and of the exhibition.
Nilufer Sasmazer