The photographer duo Kaya & Blank explore the complex relationship between human influence and the natural world. Their approach is rooted in documentary practices, with a keen eye for the remnants of economic infrastructures. They deconstruct the political undercurrents embedded within urban landscapes, creating landscapes that seamlessly blend existing structures into dense compilations of industrial fragments, oscillating between the familiar and the otherworldly. By predominantly capturing their subjects at night, their art highlights contemporary urban spaces' artificial and eerie qualities.

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Published in issue #1 2024, Creative Photography

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Kaya & Blank: We are lens-based media artists exploring how humans shape and inhabit the world. The influence of neoliberal politics on our lives has been an essential part of our practice in recent years. Our projects often focus on traces of economic infrastructure to examine politics in built environments and how humanity's dominance over nature manifests in everyday architecture. In our work, we erase the physical distance between existing structures and create dense compilations of industrial fragments to construct new landscapes that simultaneously look alien and familiar.

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Deeply grounded in documentary practices, our approach is characterised by a strong emphasis on research. However, by pushing the boundaries of how reality can be depicted, we transcend the representation domain and create completely independent, often hyperreal, visual worlds. As a result, the boundaries between reality and fiction in their work become blurred. By framing subjects almost exclusively at night, we aim to accentuate contemporary urban environments' artificial and uncanny qualities. This visual strategy often has the effect that viewers interpret the documentary parts of the works as computer-generated images.

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The Second Nature series showcases cell tower trees that have become a fixture in Southern California's landscape. The proliferation of mobile devices has led to a significant increase in the requirements of the telecommunication industry's infrastructure. Cell towers have been erected worldwide since the 80s to meet this demand. However, the appearance of these towers has undergone significant changes in recent years. In 1992, an antenna was designed to look like an artificial pine tree, marking the beginning of a trend towards disguising cell towers. This trend has since become widespread, raising essential questions by Kaya & Blank about the relationship between humans and nature.

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About

Kaya & Blank is an artist duo of Turkish-German origin currently based in Los Angeles. The duo has been active since 2019 and has participated in various institutional exhibitions and international festivals. During their residency at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester 2022, the duo developed a unique method to grow photographs from living algae. Their photographic series "Second Nature," which showcases cell towers disguised as trees and palms in Southern California, has won multiple awards and received international recognition. The photographic series was also published as a monograph by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2022.

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www.kayablank.com