Nuri Bilge Ceylan: In Another Place

“In Another Place” presents never-before-seen portraits by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, one of the most authentic filmmakers of today’s cinema. The exhibition brings together works that are unlike what the artist has created thus far: 22 portraits taken by Ceylan in Turkey and geographies around the world as diverse as India, Georgia, China, Morocco and Russia.

Among the qualities that the portraits share are the relationships the characters establish with the built environment and natural landscapes, carefully constructed photographic atmospheres, the use of dramatic light, the dialogue between different colors, understated emotions, and calm facial expressions. Ceylan’s portraits point to the depth of human experiences that bind us together, while simultaneously bringing to mind that our lives cannot be separated from geography. The reference to “another place” in the exhibition title and series not only evokes the many countries to which Ceylan has traveled, it also refers to the characters of his cinema, who desire to be “somewhere other” than where they are.

Revealing the daily struggles, loneliness, boredom and melancholy of people around the world through his subjects, who gaze directly at the photographer and therefore also at us, Ceylan focuses on the common emotions across geographies rather than the differences. The unique formal language in all of Ceylan’s photographs activate our imagination and make us feel connected to people and geographies that we have never been to or experienced.

Curator: Demet Yıldız Dinçer
Assistant Curator: Dilara Ulu

About the artist:

Born in Istanbul on January 26, 1959, he spent his childhood in Yenice, his paternal hometown in Çanakkale province. After graduating from the Department of Electrical Engineering at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, he studied cinema at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University for two years. Following his short film entitled Cocoon (1995), his feature-length films Small Town (1997) and Clouds of May (1999) were screened at the Berlin Film Festival. His subsequent films Distant (2002), Climates (2006), Three Monkeys (2008) and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011), were awarded the Grand Jury Prize (twice), the Best Director, the Best Actor and the FIPRESCI Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. His film Winter Sleep (2014) won the Palme d’Or at the 67th Cannes Film Festival, the highest prize awarded by the jury. Following The Wild Pear Tree (2018), his new film About Dry Grasses, having wrapped up filming in August 2021, has also be screened at Cannes in May 2023. While location scouting across Türkiye for his film Climates, he rekindled his passion for photography which had started during his high school years, but was paused for about a decade after attending university. Ever since then, he devotes his time to both cinema and photography.

Mud Boys, India, 2011
150 x 178 cm
Archival pigment print