The Google Earth image in Sergen Şehitoğlu’s solo show ‘‘Pebbles'' is the record of a specific moment obtained from a certain area of the city of Gaza at a certain time. This moment is one of the images of the area obtained at 7 different time periods and contains the most information due to its content. The explosion area in this visual and the linear structure created by the plane that we consider to be the reason of that explosion appears just on the opposite wall in an algebraic and geometric way. Each function corresponds to a curve on the plane and each curve to a function. Regardless of how much everything is “shapeless”, there are as many shapes as there are mathematical equations to be developed to represent it.
''13.1. In Şehitoğlu’s exhibition, we see different “modellings” structured around the same “model”. The artist documented an area of the city of Gaza, which he picked as a model by using a GPS (global positioning system) based software, known to everyone as Google Earth, and saving screenshots on his computer. However, because these images do not carry enough data that could be enlarged into the size that we are seeing in the exhibition, the artist has spent many hours in front of the computer, toured Gaza area in close-up, and captured numerous images of the area. The detailed birds-eye view of Gaza presented in the exhibition is, actually, a collage consisting of many photographs that the artist captured while he was touring the area in close-up on Google Earth.
13.1.1. We should add to this preliminary information that just like Cézanne paying a visit to the same mountain to picture the changing views of Sainte-Victoire Mountain, Şehitoğlu visits the aforementioned area of Gaza continuously, and documents the area’s changing views again and again. The exhibition features seven of those, along with numerical expressions stating their location information. However, it should be remembered that these are all visual productions and the artist has never witnessed the model that he documented. In other words, Şehitoğlu does not witness views of Gaza as Cézanne witnessed views of Sainte-Victoire Mountain. As we stated in the beginning of this text, he only touches the photographs that we believe are representative of Gaza, namely, visual guises of other symbolic expressions.
13.2. We observe that the artist strongly accentuates this situation by abstracting a function from the relations between the visual elements in the Gaza composition situated in our field of perception. The function and its graphic notation are actually constituted according to the way they come together in the Gaza photograph situated on the wall across them, meaning they are two different symbolic expressions that have the same meaning. In this respect, all works that look visually disconnected from each other in the exhibition are actually structurally relevant.
13.3. The graphic notation of this function on a cartesian grid stands next to the function. The function and its graphical notation come together to form a mural with a structurally symmetrical composition.
The diagonal line in the graphic forms a similar relationship to the one that smoke forms with the space in the Gaza photograph, with its space -the white wall.''
Yağız Özgen
2020
Gaza 29.07.2014
2020
Gaza
2020
Installation Shot
“f(x): 0.176x – 0.29”
2020
“f(x): 0.176x – 0.29” installation shot, detail
2020
