Kutay Yavuz: Mapping the Terrain of Memory
The work of Kutay Yavuz rests in that liminal, always-changing space where memories feel like air—you can touch them, breathe them, but you can’t hold them.
His background already suggests this sensibility: a historian who turned to cinematography, starting as an obsessive collector of images. He archived moments not for nostalgia’s sake but as evidence of lived experience. Kutay’s work is a fascinating blend of documentation and emotion, where the histories of the places he lives in become integral to his visual practice.
Don’t Look Back - A Memoir
His “Don't Look Back / A Memoir” video art (part of Memoryscape/The Wrong Biennale) extends that instinct into a more vulnerable register. The work navigates the quiet ache of “homesickness,” but not as simple longing. It explores how memories shift with time—how they shed their less convenient edges, how they refine themselves into “good versions,” even during bad times and political turmoils, and how the mind rewrites its own archive for the sake of survival. Homesickness becomes less about a country or a childhood room and more about the after-image of a self one used to be.
It’s a natural next step for an artist who has always been good at catching the feeling of things that don’t last.
His early pictures — quick silhouettes in Istanbul, Paris, London, Budapest; travellers stuck between places; night streets where someone has just been or is about to show up — are already full of stories that don’t want to finish. Many of these works rely on silhouettes or reflections as his preferred visual metaphor for the half-known human story: a present yet elusive narrative.
His biography strengthens this impression. A teenager in Antalya captures life with a low-budget camera, a young adult documents events and exhibitions at ARTER in Istanbul, and a traveller across Europe uses his lens as a way to stay connected to an ever-changing sense of belonging. Studying cinematography in the UK further sharpened his instinct, placing him within a new cultural context and deepening his visual discipline.
His latest video feels like the emotional synopsis of all these experiences. The work doesn’t mourn the lost home; it questions whether “home” was ever a stable geography to begin with. Memory is treated as a collaborator—unreliable, but generous. Yavuz seems to suggest that homesickness is not a yearning to go back but an awareness that the mind itself is the place we return to, again and again, reshaping rooms that no longer physically exist.
From my perspective, what makes his practice so captivating is how seamlessly he weaves personal history and visual inquiry. He approaches the urban environment like a historian reading a palimpsest, yet shoots with the intuitive curiosity of someone who still treats a camera as a diary. The body of work expands his ongoing preoccupation with urban solitude into a philosophical meditation on identity in transit. It affirms an artist who isn’t simply documenting the world, but mapping the shifting terrain of memory itself.
For a broader audience, including designers, filmmakers, and city explorers, Yavuz emerges as a representative of the in-between: a chronicler of the places that influence us and the manifestations of ourselves we leave behind as we traverse them.
