Antemortem

The Body Before Silence

A body caught between memory and erasure. Antemortem traces the soft residue of life before it slips into stillness.

The Latin antemortem means “before death”—a clinical term used in forensic medicine to distinguish wounds inflicted on the living from those found on the dead. Burak Bulut Yıldırım reclaims this cold terminology for something tender: photographs that dwell in the space between presence and absence, capturing bodies that seem already to be fading.

Roland Barthes described photography’s essence as “ça-a-été”—that which has been. Every photograph is a record of something that existed but is now irrevocably past. Antemortem intensifies this quality. These images feel like photographs of photographs, records of presences already becoming ghosts. The series engages with the memento mori tradition—those Renaissance paintings of skulls and wilting flowers meant to remind viewers of mortality—but without the moralizing. There is no sermon here, only a sustained attention to the body’s transience.

The visual language moves between registers: high-contrast images that recall Victorian mourning photography, and work in deep blues, muted reds, and spectral tones that evoke the threshold between sleep and waking. Veils and translucent materials are central to the series—fabric functioning not as costume but as membrane between visibility and disappearance. The body is glimpsed through layers, partially erased, never fully present.

Yıldırım frequently works in liminal spaces: abandoned structures, rooms where antique surfaces hold tarnished reflections, interiors that feel suspended between past and present. Long exposures allow movement to blur and multiply the body, creating images where a single figure appears to fragment across time. These are not effects added later but durational captures—the body’s passage recorded as trace.

The bodies in Antemortem are nude, but the nudity carries no erotic charge. Stripped of clothing, the figure becomes elemental—closer to the condition it will return to. The nude here is the body in its most vulnerable, most mortal state: unadorned, unprotected, soon to be absent.

Antemortem has been an ongoing meditation for over eight years, with images accumulated slowly across locations in Germany, Italy, and Turkey. The series represents a long-term artistic inquiry into impermanence—not as concept but as visual experience. Selected works are available as limited edition archival prints through Artsper, Saatchi Art, and Artmajeur.