Berk Kır

Lives & works in Istanbul, Turkey
 

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Born in Istanbul in 1997, Berk Kır is a multifaceted practitioner whose work integrates the roles of art historian, researcher, and artist. Engaging with image theory, conceptual thought, and object-oriented ontology, his practice explores the layered dynamics between body, gender, and urban environments. For him, photography is not merely a tool for documentation but an extension of his physical and intellectual presence  a medium for long-term observation and spatial inquiry.
 

Between 2019 and 2024, he collaborated with Samsung Turkey as a brand ambassador, contributing to digital content development. 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 the photography editor at Unlimited Publications.
 

His practice blurs the boundaries between visual narration and research, exploring how objects and images shape perception, memory, and spatial identity. As a visible and sensing subject, he positions photography as an extension of his bodily experience within urban life. Rather than capturing fleeting moments, his photographs operate as temporal accumulations quiet observations that unfold across time and space. Objects gathered along his walking routes, and their shifting meanings across geographies, form the conceptual backbone of his inquiry.
 

He approaches photography not merely as a representational medium but as an autonomous, bodily entity a material presence that carries its own agency, temporality, and potential for thought. Informed by object-oriented ontology, his work seeks to decenter the human gaze and reconsider the photograph as an object among objects one that both perceives and is perceived. This perspective allows him to explore the latent life of surfaces, where images act as porous thresholds between materiality, memory, and affect.
 

Deeply engaged with fluid notions of identity and resistance, his work resists fixed categories, revealing subtle gestures of opposition within visual language. His practice unfolds through an attunement to slowness and ambiguity processes that foreground the photograph’s capacity to think, to sense, and to exist beyond the act of depiction.
 

For him, photography is not simply a means of documentation but a thinking surface a space where perception and presence intertwine. Each image carries traces of lived experience, material encounters, and invisible relations that challenge the boundaries between self and world. Through this, he invites viewers to reconsider what it means to see, to be seen, and to share the fragile, embodied act of looking.

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