Silva Bingaz
Opus 3c
February 15 – March 22, 2025
Silva Bingaz’s new one-person exhibition Opus 3c will take place at Öktem Aykut from February 15th to March 22nd. The opening will be on Saturday, February 15th, between 16.00-19.00.
Since 2001, Silva Bingaz has worked in photography, focusing on historically rich and multilayered micro-geographies, documenting precarious and transient lives in peripheral areas. Drawn to the interactions between humans, animals and nature, particularly in coastal cities, Bingaz has immersed herself in the turbulence unique to these landscapes that are characteristcally exempt from any kind of social hierarchy. In Opus 3c, she presents a photo series created during her visits to Latvia in 2017. The series carries a weight comparable to her previous Coast series from Istanbul and Japan. The title Opus 3c both references the earlier stages of the series and hints at Bingaz’s ongoing commitment to a musical approach in her exhibition choices.
”The photographs I took in Latvia constitute the latest part of my Coast trilogy. With the awareness of the paradox between the terror of death and the painful reality of birth, Opus 3c carries an admiration to the unending endeavor for existence. This series adds up little episodes to my Coast series, while it meanders around the main thematic framework that aims to break through the historical reality that oppresses our reasons to exist. These episodes are some of the main expressions of existence.”
Silva Bingaz’s oeuvre belongs to the tradition of personal photography. Her work is related to the notion of approach, an indispensable element of the art of photography. Through the way she forms a relationship with the people she is about to photograph, she creates a space that allows for them to be instinctive. Bingaz develops a sense of belonging to the people and animals she photographs. Her photographs aim to capture transient moments that hold private unfoldings of the human experience. The main themes in Opus 3c are again defined by the idea of giving birth; and the efforts to record the act of bringing into existence, the act that remains unrecorded and rather traditionally unknown.
In Opus 3c there is another layer that Bingaz tries out where she gives a reference to Ed van der Elsken, one of her favorite photographers. Embracing not only death and lost times but also the birth and renewal rituals of the longest days of the year in Baltic and Scandinavian traditions, Opus 3c is Silva Bingaz’s second one-person exhibition at Öktem Aykut since her previous exhibition Balat in 2015. The exhibition design of Opus 3c is assumed by Sevim Sancaktar and Yavuz Parlar.