Ali Taptik



Ali Taptık is an artist, photographer and PhD Candidate in Architectural Design at ITU. His work deals with the representation of urban landscape and architecture, and the relationship between the individual and the city are some of the themes that he explores. In addition to working with institutions to documenting ever changing Istanbul, Taptık has published several books including Kaza ve Kader (Filigranes Editions, 2009); Depicting Istanbul(Akin Nalca, 2010) and There are no failed experiments. (Atelier de Visu, 2012).

He is represented by The Empire Project, Kerimcan Guleryuz Istanbul and the Cuadro Gallery, Bashar Al Shroogi, Dubai.


Reform - Reset - Revisit

A commission for the Pavilion of Turkey at Venice Biennial for Architecture, “Reform-Reset-Revisits” investigates relationship of forms, transitions of styles, transformation of areas in the late 19th Century and 20th Century architectural production in Istanbul. “Reform-Reset-Revisit” consists of a constellation of 69 images of significant building details, works of architecture and urban areas. Portraits and water bottles meddle into an architectural set of images hinting to changing ideals of time. The series was exhibited as 16m long installation as part of the exhibition “Places of Memory”.
“Nostalgia and memory are two things that somehow feed into each other. Feeling under my skin that things have changed too much, too fast, which brings a strange anxiety, a sense of loss… Photography itself is a two-sided blade where you always have to deal with an event which you transform and make part of a history via transformation, so it is always subjective, it is always a construction… I [also] have another kind of memory which doesn’t belong to me, when I close my eyes I try to render how this place was 50 or 100 years ago. There is a certain longing for the past, but I had to represent or capture this without romanticizing it.”— Ali Taptık
Excerpt from Places of Memory (Istanbul: İKSV, 2014): 33


Kaza Ve Kader

“Ali Taptik sets up a fragmented narration on life with his photography series entitled “Accident and Fate”. Under the uncanny beauty of the gloomy and dark frames, he confronts the viewer with the detailed fragments of accidents that the city unfolds. In these frames, the city is real and physical; depicting the claim that in order to sense the city, one should physically be engaged with the city.”
Excerpt from Basak Senova’s “DECISIVE ACCIDENTS” article
*Accident and Fate


Familiar Strangers

Rather than glamour, then, it is this living ruin which the photographs of Taptik seek: the place of the individual carving out a space of life within and despite the city, as though swearing at it. (..) Yet the photographs do not capture these subjects as lost or pathetic, but rather as defiant, as though they opt out of the city as a form of voting, as a means of representing themselves in the alternative, sequestered places of the city which are not represented by municipal fictions such as elections and administrations who recycle nostalgia to brand the city. By featuring actual lived spaces, Taptik represents the ruin that comes not from a weighty past, but from a weighty and largely young population that often cannot see its future. In doing so, he gives his subjects a presence that exposes their absent voice. Turning away from the city’s historic legacy, from the picturesque frame of how it is supposed to be seen, the photographs of Taptik provide a vision onto an actual modern city which expresses itself democratically, and suggest through the image how a democratic society might learn, in this new generation, to express itself politically as well." Wendy M.K. Shaw on Familiar Strangers