Niş

Niş photographs the quiet relationship between a body and its surroundings. A woman leans into a curtain, curls around the arm of a chair, rests in the light between two rooms. These are not performances. They are the private theatres of everyday solitude, where a window frame becomes a proscenium and a fold of bedding becomes a landscape. The camera does not intervene in this intimacy; it records what happens when the body finds a place to settle.

The series takes its title literally. Figures occupy architectural recesses: the hollow of an ornate wooden cabinet, the depth of a window embrasure, the shadow beneath a skylight. They fold themselves into corners as if the room had made space for them, or as if they were trying to disappear into its geometry. The body does not dominate the interior; it negotiates with it, finding the places where it can rest.

Domestic objects accumulate meaning across the series. Heavy curtains in burgundy and brown frame figures like stage drapes; velvet armchairs hold bodies the way hands hold faces. Cats appear throughout — curled nearby, walking past, watching — silent witnesses to private hours. On the walls, art answers back: Alphonse Mucha’s sinuous figures, classical drawings of draped women, photographs of nudes. These images-within-images produce a quiet dialogue, a mise en abyme in which the photographed body echoes the bodies already hanging in the room. The effect is neither ironic nor reverent. It acknowledges that the nude in interior space is always in conversation with every nude that preceded it.

The work sits in dialogue with Johannes Vermeer’s interiors, where light enters through leaded windows and figures exist in suspension between action and stillness. The rooms of Niş are more worn, more lived-in — apartments with radiators and winter trees visible through glass, villas with cracked plaster, anonymous hotel rooms beneath Art Nouveau headboards. Nan Goldin’s domestic photographs register here too, though softer, less confessional. These are not documents of crisis; they are records of the ordinary intimacy between a person and the rooms they inhabit.

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)