Kill Memories

Sergen Şehitoğlu presents two years old project, called “Kill Memories”, is comprised of 15 images captured from a computer screen. These are the images of a young woman, a cam model, who contacts her customers via a webcam which, in this case, substitutes a camera.

Concerned with the use of photograph as medium in the era we live in today, the artist sets here multiple angles for the viewer. First of all, he puts forward the nature of photography as medium. A non-traditional tool, the webcam, essentially possessed by the object of the photograph, is instrumentalized and used by the artist. Thus, the series open up a discussion about the nature of the art of photography. Another important question that the artist discusses is the form that our relations have taken with digital age. Besides, in contact for almost more than a year, between the artist and the subject, grows an odd connection here. And these photographs taken at different times during more than a year represent a special kind of virtual relationship where online life overtakes the ‘real world’ life, just like in the recent film of Spike Jones, “Her”. This connection becomes even more complicated with the fact that the woman, consciously exposing herself, is not aware that she is being part of an artistic project. Here, the boundaries between private and public become extremely blurry.

After capturing the images, Şehitoğlu processed these shots in distinct ways like deciding the frame, the blur or the colours. In a way, this series is also a new look to Thomas Ruff’s 2003 series “Nudes” where he plays on the pornographic jpegs collected on the web. Although the series “Kill Memories” is not erotic, nor pornographic; the two methods stay parallel as the virtual images are gathered via internet and then transformed into optically beautiful but contextually profound imagery.