Just Arrived — Murat Kahya

Just Arrived:
Here, There, Over There (2025)

Photography, Site-specific Installation

1. Photo-Sculpture Installation (4 Pieces)
UV print on 3mm transparent plexiglass, hand-shaped using heat and iron marble
2. Photography Installation
66 archival pigment prints on fine art paper, mounted on 33 MDFs within a wooden panel
3. Photographs
Archival pigment prints in varying sizes
4. Video and Sound Installation
Three-channel color video and three-channel sound installation
5. Photographic Installation (2 Pieces)
Archival pigment prints on fine art paper, framed
6. Photographic Installation
Pigment print on silk, two pieces
7. Video
Single-channel color video film

Taking migration beyond geographical relocation, the project focuses on the state of otherness an individual can feel within themselves, even without crossing physical borders. Every movement—from a small town in Anatolia to Istanbul, from Morocco to Corsica, or from the margins of society to its center—converges in this shared sense of estrangement. Belonging here is not a physical coordinate but a fluid experience, shaped by the web of relationships one forms or fails to form.

The conceptual backbone of the project is the metaphor of the stone in the river, which depicts the process of individuation. Those who set foot on an island or in a new place as part of a collective mass evolve into solitary journeys the moment they arrive. Like a stone that breaks away from its source and travels toward the sea, the individual thins, erodes, and changes form within this flow. This is not a passive drifting in harmony with the current; it is an aesthetics of erosion that, at times against the current and at others through chance, detaches the individual from the whole and brings them to their own unique subjectivity.

This narrative is embodied in the visual and material contrasts within the works. While the clear sky above figures with typological similarities heralds a shared human roof and boundless hope, the systematic, grid-like arrangement of the photographs reduces the individual to an anonymized archival record or an identity file in an official institution. The gaps deliberately left between the images open a space for untold stories and missing bodies to be completed by the viewer’s gaze.

In this journey, the sea is both an end and a beginning: a landscape with clear boundaries for those who are settled, and a gateway of boundless hope constructed in the mind of the newcomer. Encounters built on shared labor, such as the mandarin harvest, and the image of the tree soften these dualities. This world, where the real and the imagined, the desired and the existing intersect, is constructed through photography, video, sound, and installation. The viewer is invited not to look from a fixed point, but to move, to share the gaze, and to re-examine their own thresholds of belonging within this asymmetric witnessing.

Exhibition #1 – Ka Space for Visual Culture and Thinking, Ankara, TR

Exhibition #2 – A Cisterna, Museum of Corsica, Corte, FR

Exhibition #3 – Bayetav Sanat, Izmir, TR

Exhibition #4 – Yüzonbir, Istanbul, TR