Niche

A niche is a hollow in a wall: a space shaped for something that is not yet there. Niche takes this as its starting point. The series photographs the emptiness a body feels when it is left alone in a room, the hollow that opens around a person once everyone else has gone. The camera stays outside this solitude and records what happens when the body has nowhere else to be.

Rooms are made to the measure of bodies. A chair keeps the angle of a back, a bed the length of a sleeper, a doorway the height of someone walking through, so that even an empty room describes the people it was built for. Left alone, a person begins to fit into the shapes the room has kept. A corner is the smallest shelter a room can offer: two walls meeting, enough to hold a body that wants to be held.

The figures occupy the room's own hollows. They fold themselves into corners as if the room had made space for them. Slowly, the boundary between body and room loosens. Colour and material carry this merging: the palette of the room becomes the palette of the skin.

Pictures hang on the walls, and the photographed body echoes the bodies already hanging in the room, an image of a figure inside an image of a figure.

Light enters through the windows and holds the figures between action and stillness, as if they had stopped halfway through something. The rooms are worn and lived-in, and the photographs keep their intimacy without turning it into confession.

A woman alone in her room is easily imagined through a keyhole: unaware of being watched, her privacy turned into something for the viewer. Niche keeps the distance of the doorway and drops the pretence of secrecy. The figure knows the camera is there. The solitude in the frame belongs to the person in it, who decides how much of it to show.

Burak's most recent works convey portions of female body parts with extreme high contrast and in fusion with texture; however, his works showing full female figures in interiors convey a sense of psychological and theatrical strategy towards understanding the relationship between figures and space.— Michael Hanna, Curator, Aedra Fine Arts (full review)