Curatorial Project — 2015
LandAkt
The body in landscape, photographed as an encounter between flesh and earth.
Artcore Gallery, Thessaloniki
2015
Greece
Burak Bulut Yıldırım
Curator & Lead Photographer
Black & white photography
The exhibition’s core proposition was structural: that the nude body, photographed within a landscape rather than inside a studio, ceases to be a subject isolated from context. Instead, it becomes continuous with the material world around it — rock, water, vegetation, wind. The photographs in LandAkt were made without studio lighting, without staged compositions, and without post-production intervention. What the camera recorded was what was present: a body, a place, and the light between them.
Every image in the exhibition was in black and white. This was not a stylistic preference; it was a strategy to remove the chromatic register that can sentimentalise landscape photography. Without colour, the body becomes topography and the topography becomes anatomy. The question the exhibition asked — whether the nude in landscape can avoid the pastoral tradition that has shaped centuries of European art — was addressed through this tonal discipline.
LandAkt was the curator’s first formal curatorial project. Unlike his subsequent curatorial work in The Nudes of Istanbul (Die Akt Galerie, Berlin, 2026), where he serves as sole curator without exhibiting his own photographic work, LandAkt placed the curator’s own photographs within the selection alongside the participating photographers. The curatorial development since then, toward a clearer separation of curatorial and artistic roles, reflects a deliberate evolution in methodology across a decade of continued practice.
The thematic ground explored in LandAkt has continued to develop in the curator’s ongoing series Ökoton, which extends the investigation of the body as a transitional zone between human and non-human environments.
Selected Works & Exhibition Documentation
From the exhibition at Artcore Gallery, Thessaloniki, 2015.
Participating Photographers
The exhibition presented works by eight photographers in total: the curator and seven photographers developed through his workshop practice in Istanbul. Two of the seven were women. The group had been working together on the relationship between the body and the natural environment for an extended period preceding the exhibition, making work across locations in Turkey and Greece.
Context & Approach
The decision to present the exhibition in Thessaloniki rather than Istanbul was deliberate. Greece shares with Turkey a long history of the nude in art, from classical Mediterranean sculpture to modern photography, but in 2015 its public and institutional context for photographic nudes was more open than Turkey’s. The geographical proximity and the cultural continuity made Artcore Gallery a meaningful first venue for a project that had been developed in Turkey but could not, at that moment, find a gallery platform at home.
This logic of “producing in Turkey, presenting internationally” became a recurring structural feature of the curator’s later practice. It reappears, in a more explicit and politically articulated form, in The Nudes of Istanbul eleven years later.
Thematic Continuation
The body-in-landscape inquiry opened by LandAkt has continued in the curator’s own fine art practice through the series Ökoton. Where LandAkt was a bounded group project with a specific exhibition framework, Ökoton is an ongoing solo investigation that extends the same conceptual ground across a longer duration and a wider range of environments, drawing on the theoretical framework of Donna Haraway’s natureculture and related contemporary ecological thought.