Despite the artist having preferred the photograph as his artistic product, the result doesn't necessarily establish a parallel with a comprehension of the "moment" with which we traditionally attribute to photographs. Just as the poet Birhan Keskin describes in the introduction of the exhibit catalogue, it depicts a poetic and picturesque conception of time, portraying a surreal story emerging from the combining of photographs with no subject, taken at different places (and sometimes at the same place), at different times. These days, as people who are excessively exposed to “visuals”, something holds for all of us: A visual cannot remain as a visual in our minds, even the most powerful of that which is current dissolves, collapses and disintegrates as soon as we see it. With no recollection, it swiftly falls from grace.

Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that Ömer Orhun does not present us with conventional photographs in this case; instead, using photography, through certain images, he tells us something that pertains to time. Orhun’s search for the whole sometimes asserts itself while trying to recall a memory, a room, a night, and sometimes like a stutter where we stumble over its letters. This is the eye’s and memory’s trial with photography. Although it may appear that the possibilities of the eye are infinite, that is not the case. The same goes for the limit of a registering memory. It exists so much as it can retain and recall.

Birhan Keskin