The ROSPHOTO State Museum and Exhibition Centre presents About Türkiye, an exhibition project bringing together more than 100 works by contemporary Turkish photographer Kamil Fırat. The exhibition introduces visitors to the results of the artist’s long-term exploration of the culture, traditions, and everyday life of various regions of the Republic of Türkiye.

Kamil Fırat was born in 1959 in Üsküdar, the historic district of Istanbul. Since 1980, he has been engaged in photography, art theory, and teaching at the Department of Photography of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University. His work focuses on the material and cultural heritage of Türkiye, Ottoman architecture, and historical memory, with photography serving simultaneously as an artistic and research-based practice.

The series presented in the exhibition was created over several decades, from the late 1970s to the present day, across different parts of the Anatolian Peninsula (the historical name for Asia Minor), which constitutes the greater part of modern Türkiye. The geography of the project encompasses major cultural centres such as Istanbul, Trabzon, and İzmir, as well as smaller towns and settlements including Rize, Kayseri, and Manisa.

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The exhibition has been organized at the initiative and with the participation of Hasan Senyücel — photojournalist, publisher, and founder of the House of Photography in Istanbul, who has dedicated many years to promoting Turkish photography internationally. From 2004 to 2014, he served as the official representative of Magnum Photos in Türkiye.

“To encounter this great, multilayered, monumental history in everything upon which the eye falls is astonishing. In contemporary Türkiye, traces of millennia of history coexist simultaneously, side by side,” — writes Hasan Senyücel.

Kamil Fırat’s archive comprises approximately 200,000 negatives and spans a period of more than fifty years. Selected from this extensive collection, the photographs presented in the exhibition offer a panoramic view of the last half-century of life in Türkiye.

This project marks the first presentation of Kamil Fırat’s work to Russian audiences.

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ROSPHOTO extends its special gratitude for support and participation in the preparation of the exhibition project to Alexander Antonovich Kolesnikov — orientalist, professor of Historical Sciences, and director of the St. Petersburg Society for Scientific and Cultural Relations with Türkiye.

The project has been realized with the support of the St. Petersburg Society for Scientific and Cultural Relations with Türkiye, Karınca Logistics, Ada Art Fine Art Printing, and Turkish Airlines.

HASAN ŞENYÜKSEL 

Recent archaeological excavations have pushed the history of the Anatolian geography back 12,000 years. In other words, the land we live on has been accumulating for 12,000 years. From East to West, from North to South, throughout history people have passed through  these lands; some made it their home, while others plundered it.

Whether they settled or plundered, every action left a trace on this land. 
Today, the culture of Anatolia is the sum of all these traces… 
Eyes peering through the crack of a door, 
A hand resting on a sibling’s shoulder over stone walls, 
A musician inflating his bagpipe to carry his voice to the mountain peaks, 
Villagers sorting and bagging hazelnuts, 
Agricultural workers keeping rhythm in their steps while carrying sacks of potatoes onto trucks, 

Those who wear all their jewelry at weddings, 
Tobacco leaves hung on adobe walls to dry, 
Those who wear silence as clothing, 
Those who live on the wings of birds, 
Those who exalt labor within a grain of sand, 
Those who make wishes to God, 
Those who sacrifice animals for God, 
Those who sanctify death by giving their name on the wedding night, 
Those who rewind time while boiling molasses in cauldrons, 
Those who dig deep into the earth to rewind time even further… 
And hundreds of other forms of actions and behaviors. 
All of them are embodied forms of what this land has accumulated.

To encounter that great, multilayered monumental history in everything you look at—this is extraordinary… The multilayered nature of Anatolia has survived to the present, sometimes stacked, sometimes side by side. Today, within the geography of Türkiye, indicators of thousands of years exist simultaneously, either side by side or layered upon one another. Whether layered or side by side, all these strata are born from within one another. To witness, through photography, what has accumulated in such a geography and in the bodies of its people…

Kâmil Fırat often refers, through photography, to Augustus’s phrase: “Time is our body.” Indeed… the human body is a mirror of the land it belongs to, of its culture—in other words, of time itself. And when lenses are directed at these bodies, they record not only a body, but also the “dust of time” accumulated upon it. Not what is behind, in front of, or beside it… only what has accumulated on it.

The “About Türkiye” selection consists of photographs brought together in light of this approach. During his photographic work, which began in 1977, Kâmil Fırat accumulated images from the most remote corners of Anatolia to its most well-known centers over nearly 50 years. The photographs selected from this body of work form a panorama of the last fifty years of Türkiye. 

Another feature of this exhibition is that many of the photographs are being revealed for the first time. Kâmil Fırat is an archivist. His archive, consisting of 200,000 negatives, contains a portion of Türkiye’s history.

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