Sarp Kerem Yavuz: Shadows of the Empire

December 8 - January 28th

Award-winning gay photographer Sarp Kerem Yavuz celebrates his 10th career solo exhibition, presenting a decade-long photographic journey dealing with masculinity, censorship, orientalism, homoerotica, politics, and religion.

With 30 artworks, including film-based photographs commissioned by Sotheby’s Buy Now, and the artist’s monumental 21-foot photograph Iman printed on fabric, “Shadows of the Empire” offers an early career retrospective of the artist’s first decade to demonstrate frightening parallels between Turkey’s recent history of conservative and oppressive politics, and America’s present.

From Antalya to New York, elements of the Turkish bath, or the hammam, feature prominently in his works, imbuing the portraits he takes with repressed and sexually charged mythologies. Recognizing the current American cultural period as one in which women’s rights are under attack, “Shadows of the Empire” offers several rare photographs of women in hammams, presented alongside the artist’s main focus of male portraiture. Celebrating female visibility and sexuality, these pieces were produced in 2022 as a reaction to Turkey’s new sweeping censorship laws and public decency policies.

Taking visual cues from orientalist painters of the 18th and 19th centuries, the artist uses photography to reclaim a narrative that othered and exotified the Middle East. Perhaps the historic, colonialist fascination with these spaces and their inhabitants, overlooked the alarming ease with which the insidious politics of these luscious destinations might serve as inspiration for Western elements more interested in power and control than truth, equality, or justice.

The name of the exhibition is borrowed from a late 1990s LucasArts video game set in the Star Wars universe; the same universe where the main villain, the Emperor, creates the enemy at the source of the story’s central political conflict, much like the way the current, de-secularized state of Turkey and its rogue, Machiavellian president are a product of U.S. foreign policy. In the 1990s, the West hoped to cultivate a moderate Islamic Republic in the Middle East that they could leverage to influence the entire region. In an ironic twist, most present day American conservatives quite openly borrow from the Turkish ruling party’s 20-year rhetoric, which seems to have become a blueprint for creating an America where truth has ceased to exist, which the artist is trying desperately to warn against.

Sarp Kerem Yavuz

The works of Sarp Kerem Yavuz reclaim Orientalist imagery and bring the visual legacy of the Middle East into the present. Through photography, light projection, neon sculpture and digital drawing, he creates visually provocative works of art in pursuit of peaceful coexistence.

Born in Paris in 1991 to a Turkish family in exile, Sarp Kerem Yavuz became the youngest photographer in the history of the Istanbul Modern to exhibit and be included into the museum’s permanent collection in 2013 for his Polaroid series exploring stories of father-son relationships.

His subsequent large format photographs reimagining Western depictions of masculinity  earned him the Leah Freed Memorial Prize from Oberlin College, the Young Fresh Different Award from CDA Projects/Zilberman Gallery, and the New Artist Society Award from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.In 2013, he became the youngest artist to exhibit and be included in the permanent collection of the Istanbul Modern Museum.

Facing death threats and censorship in Turkey, Sarp has been living and working largely in New York since 2018, and was most recently exhibited at Christie’s in 2020 as part of the charity exhibition Educate. In the summer of 2022, he had a solo show at Trotter&Sholer Gallery on the Lower East Side, called “Garden of Turkish Delights” which earned him the Moon and Stars Grant from the American Turkish Society.

His photographs are included in The Luciano Benetton Collection as part of Imago Mundi, the JPMorgan Chase Collection, and the permanent collections of the CICA Museum in South Korea, the Norton Museum in Florida, the Allen Memorial Art Museum and the Transformer Station in Ohio, the Polaroid (Impossible Project) Collection in Berlin, the Soho House Collection in Istanbul and New York, and The Marmara Hotel Collection in New York.