The Commute is a relatively recent form of travel. Suburbia and Exurbia ever expanding into spaces designed to accommodate this transfer; the journey has become a formality. This project seeks to see through the eyes of the Commuter and engage with the sense of loss his/her daily predicament engenders. The Commute is time lost; an ellipsis. No memoir, no matter how encyclopaedic, would dare to record the minutiae of such a journey. By virtue of repetition, it ceases to register.
Kerim Aytac works in London and was born in Istanbul in 1979.
Project title: Ellipsis: The Commute as Loss
Throughout my practice, I have been drawn to the idea of absence. My earliest projects were clearly influenced by the ‘decisive moment’ philosophy of street photography, but I had already developed a fascination with the traces of the urban landscape that reflect a human presence, rather than the presence itself. Photographs of the urban landscape, of the social, but in absentia. More recent projects have engaged with this concept from different angles. These approaches can be demarcated by different subjectivities, in that they attempt, through different conceptual frameworks, to encompass an individual’s perspective. Photographed traces suggest contact is possible, but also emphasize the distance between presence and absence.
