For years, my work has explored the boundary between the real and the artificial. Beginning with Virtual Bodies, this inquiry expanded through Virtual Places, Virtual Wars, Virtual Landscapes and Cosmos before returning, with Hybrid Souls, to the human body and the individual’s inner world. Throughout this progression, I have been concerned with how technology transforms not only images, but also our memory, our perception and our relationship with the world.
Today, this boundary feels less stable than ever. Images no longer merely represent the world; they shape what we accept as real, what we remember and even how we see ourselves. Photography’s sense of having witnessed something that was physically there has entered a more uncertain visual territory. The central question for me is no longer simply whether an image is real, but how our sense of reality is changing.
In these recent works, I approach the body as the threshold where this transformation becomes visible. I leave no firm division between body and fabric, the organic and the artificial, or the figure and the volume surrounding it. Fabric is no longer a passive covering. It becomes an extension of the body, a second skin and, at times, an organism larger than the body itself. The figure expands, folds, multiplies and reshapes the space it occupies.
The body is still human, but its form no longer belongs to the human alone.
The body interests me less as an individual portrait than as a carrier of change. As personal identity recedes, movement, form and rhythm come forward. The blurring of the body’s boundaries echoes an uncertain distance between the self and the outside world. Do we create the form, or does the form we create begin to shape us? This tension lies at the centre of the works.
I am also concerned with the temporal nature of movement. A gesture vanishes as it occurs, while photography attempts to hold it still. Rather than freeze a single instant, I bring different possibilities of movement and the imagined traces they leave into the same image. The body no longer belongs to a single moment: past, present and a possible next gesture coexist on one surface.
For this reason, I do not want to confine these works to one category—photography, sculpture or digital image. They begin with a photographic way of seeing, yet their volumes are sculptural, their folds architectural, and their forms seem almost to possess a biology of their own. They are familiar enough for us to recognise a body, but strange enough that they could not fully exist in the physical world. I work at this threshold between familiarity and estrangement.
In Hybrid Souls, hybridity is not an exceptional condition; it is part of contemporary existence. We carry strength and fragility, order and chaos, belonging and alienation at the same time. Alongside our physical bodies, we create social, digital, idealised and remembered bodies. We are shaped not by a single self, but by many selves layered over one another.
These works do not attempt to design the body of the future. They seek to make visible how the human being of the present is already changing. For me, the most important dimension of that change is existential rather than technological: how much can we change within the images, systems and desires we have created, and still remain ourselves?
Space, silence and controlled light reinforce this question. By taking the figures out of a specific geography and everyday time, I move them away from the role of documenting an event. The viewer encounters not an explained story, but an open situation. Meaning emerges not from the image alone, but also from the personal memory, bodily experience and sense of reality that each viewer brings to it.
Ultimately, my concern is not transformation alone. It is how much of ourselves we retain as we change, and where the boundaries of what we call human begin and end.
Ali Alışır
2026