Crossing to Asia Photograph - Limited Edition of 1

Veering between the mechanically photographable and the expressionistically evanescent, the phantom city auras that haunt Murat Ozkasim’s Indecisive moments prompt a visual indeterminacy that resists easy or immediate interpretation and progress a preoccupation with indeterminate meaning; where the reflex connection between what is seen and what is known is lost.The process of this visual indeterminacy works to fashion an appearance of reality that is as much subjective as it is objective, as much an invention of our own engineering as it is of any outer, self-determining world properties.. Driven by the built environment and the psychology of space, Murat Ozkasim invites us to follow his routes through the “foreign” and yet “already familiar” city topographies into hitherto uncharted realms of imagination, ideas, feelings and experience. Ozkasim’s city as the place of the foreign (and the foreigner) and yet already familiar, offers up a perspective to reflect on the emphasis and impact of today’s new cities has globally produced images. The modern city is in continuous evolution; obliging social, cultural, and migratory phenomena that by their nature are essentially dynamic and mobile. Sounding the passage to a multicultural and global society situated at the cusp of the transition from the analogue to the digital era, this new city is constituted by the emergence of different values and by the integration of the opposites of uprooting and integration, identification and transgression, and the encounter and collision of different cultures. Murat Ozkasim’s Indecisive moments photographs arean explicit invitation to ‘another place’ in physical terms, while suggesting the singular terrain of the mental space; underlining the expressive charge of direct human activity conditioned by ‘the city’ but also equally, imposed on it Directed somewhere between representation and abstraction Murat Ozkasim’s praxis constructs an axis around a thesis that aims for a photographic engagement with the visual “surface” of the City beyond familiar tourist clichés. As if a contemporary flaneur were strolling around the city, Ozkasim’s blurs and swatches develop an unforeseen narrative; a uniting of photographic detail and painterly gesture when the filtered street views that show nameless passers-by’s – blurred beyond recognition – ‘merge’ with their surroundings fuses photographic representation and painterly abstraction. These abstracted images of cities, histories and geographies signifying social action as well as suggesting an unravelling of a personal biography and become a point of departure to chart the presence of a fundamentally urbanised and digitally connected world.