The show takes its name from the German phrase Alte Liebe, which means “Old Love” and is a notion that appears in many branches of the arts from literature to painting and cinema. Defining the Alte Liebe idea in terms of the relationship that he establishes between images of different cities on the one hand and his personal history on the other, Hasan Deniz explores the memories of spaces that are as stark and devoid of human beings as possible.

The photographs in ALTE LIEBE focus on images that explore the concepts of time/timelessness and space/spacelessness in such a way as to complement one another. The photographs avoid, as much as possible, any information that might give a clue as to where they were actually taken. Instead they inspire feelings of abandonment, dereliction, and incompleteness while provoking viewers to read them in their own way.

In his work as a photographer, Hasan Deniz takes great pains to create images that refrain from denoting time and from documenting anything. We are made to sense this effort through constructs that are undefined and unidentified by any contextual information such as writing or people. In his own words, the artist concentrates instead on “content rather than on light and composition”. In the works in this show, we observe him turning his attentions to otherwise obscure details that only a careful eye might notice rather than focusing on the familiar, “iconic” objects and spaces of countries and cities.

Hasan Deniz pursues the stories, as related in their own interior voices, of things to which we have become inured and of buildings and spaces that we pass by every day, sometimes without even noticing them. Viewed individually and as a whole, Hasan Deniz’s images encourage us to read them on the basis of the concepts of timelessness and spacelessness.