Berk Kır

Lives & works in Istanbul, Turkey
Based in Berlin from October 2026
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Born in Istanbul in 1997, Berk Kır is an artist, art historian, and researcher whose practice engages image theory, conceptual thought, and object-oriented ontology to investigate the layered dynamics of body, gender, and urban environments. Between 2019 and 2024, he collaborated with Samsung Turkey as a talent, partnering with the brand as a photography ambassador. In 2021, he was named among the 100 new-generation talents in European photography by Guide to Unique Photography (Amsterdam), and in 2022 received the Young Talent of the Year award from the Association of Photography Organizations. He currently serves as photography editor at Unlimited Publications, a position that runs in parallel with his own image-making and lends his practice a dual perspective, attentive both to the editorial structures through which images circulate and to the artistic conditions under which they are made.

Artist Statement
 

I approach photography as a social and material structure rather than a fixed representation of reality. For me, photography exists simultaneously as image and object. It records the world while remaining a physical entity capable of transformation. I am interested in the potential meanings a photograph can hold rather than the single meaning it is assumed to fix. Every image is a portal whose significance continues to evolve through circulation, material transformation, and encounters with new places, objects, and viewers. A photograph does not end with its exposure. It begins another life.
 

Research is central to my practice. My projects emerge from long periods of walking, observing, collecting, and working with archives, whether institutional collections, urban environments, found objects, or my own photographic archive. What interests me is not the moment an image originally depicts, but the relationships it continues to establish over time. I think of photography as a social structure because photographs are never autonomous. Their meanings are produced through the conditions in which they circulate, are preserved, exhibited, reproduced, and continually reinterpreted. A photograph is shaped as much by these encounters as by the moment it was first made.
 

Photography, for me, is a material process of continual transformation. I return to existing images through scanning, cutting, layering, printing, rephotographing, and installation, not to reproduce them but to extend them. Every intervention becomes another chapter in the biography of an image. Rather than treating materials as neutral supports, I bring photographs into dialogue with architectural and industrial surfaces, everyday objects, archival documents, and handwritten traces, allowing each encounter to reshape both the image and the material that receives it. Meaning emerges through these acts of negotiation rather than through representation alone.
 

This understanding also shapes the way I approach the archive. Rather than seeing it as a place where images are preserved unchanged, I understand it as a living structure that continually produces new relationships across different times and contexts. I am interested in the ways photographs leave the archive, enter public space, and are transformed by the environments they inhabit. Installation therefore becomes an extension of photography itself, allowing the image to exceed the frame and exist within an architectural, social, and material ecology.
 

Influenced by object oriented ontology, I understand photographs as entities that exist alongside other objects rather than simply representing them. This perspective shifts attention away from the image as a transparent window onto the world and toward its own material presence, agency, and capacity to affect other bodies and environments. Photography becomes a field of relations in which images are not passive records but active objects that continue to negotiate meaning through time.
 

Across my practice, I return to two recurring questions: How can photography become its own object? And how can its material presence transform the spaces it inhabits? I believe photography reveals its agency precisely at the moment it encounters resistance, when it meets another material, another surface, another architecture, or another landscape. It is through these encounters that the photograph exceeds its role as representation and becomes a physical presence capable of reshaping the space around it. Rather than treating the image as a final statement, I understand every photograph as the beginning of an ongoing process, one that continues to generate new meanings, new relationships, and new forms long after the moment of its creation.