Stills

The Body as Imagined Object

The object speaks first. The body answers.

Stills is a collaborative project between photographer Burak Bulut Yıldırım and art director Meryem Aydın.

Aydın selected and photographed eight everyday objects: a hand mirror, a suspended fish, a sponge, a crumpled ball of paper, pink roses, a peeled lemon, an old book, and a dark red apple. In the studio, five contemporary dancers were shown the same object photograph moments before the shutter was released. Instead of copying the object's outline, each dancer imagined its weight, texture, and tension, translating that mental image into dance and movement. Because each dancer internalises the same object differently, one photograph returns as five distinct bodily states.

A fish hanging by its tail might evoke suspension in one dancer and surrender in another, a body caught between gravity and lift. A crumpled ball of paper might summon collapse or the memory of something once smooth. The camera records the instant when an imagined object becomes physical movement and settles into gesture.

Each object photograph is presented with the five responses it drew: Aydın's image, stark and almost forensic against black, beside Yıldırım's photographs of the dancers in soft grey studio light. The object stays single and nameable; the five bodies answer it in five different ways. The object photograph belongs to the order of the inventory, exact and complete in itself; the dancers' photographs belong to the order of the event.

The title holds three kinds of stillness. A still life: the object photographs belong to the long tradition of things arranged to be looked at. A still: a single frame lifted from a moving sequence. And the stillness of a held pose, which in a dancer is movement holding its breath.