Nowness Asia
Video essay, February 2024
Photographers in Focus: Ci Demi
Film by Murat Gökmen
Turkish photographer Ci Demi’s take on Istanbul is uncanny in its ability to represent corners and fleeting moments where pain and love coexist. Under his gaze, an immensely photogenic city unfurls to reveal not just its concrete and threads but also the complex emotional lives of its inhabitants - the personal psychogeographic terrains rather than any objective existence.
“I have a very simple idea as to what photography actually is: A photograph is an undeniable proof that you were there – to photograph is to witness. - Ci Demi”
Inspired by the visual aesthetics of Italian giallos from the ‘70s and the cinematography of classic horror films, Ci Demi’s visual language is steeped in a deeply personal yet immediately recognisable vocabulary of hauntings and traces that unsettle, even though the artist primarily shoots in the daytime.
Billowing, shimmering safety nets in the sun. Safety nets overlaid on unlikely landscapes, attempting to realise an already fruitless endeavour. Lonely backs turned to the camera, gazing upon a lonely scene and beyond. Frayed corners, metal emerging from concrete like flowers. Objects devoid of people, forgetting people. The photographer’s work is often vibrant in its dark humour, resisting Istanbul’s attempts to order his time while paying homage to its multiplicities.
Though his camera is trained on Istanbul most of the time, Ci’s work is less documentary and more an emotional response to a space and its specific sociopolitical and cultural context, exploring themes of loneliness, mental health and the human condition. Over the years, this work has served as a cathartic outlet for the photographer.
In a conversation with NOWNESS ASIA, Ci reflected, “I would say that it’s been healing for me. For a considerable amount of time, it was the only reason I stepped outside the house, for example. Photography gives me control over life, too, over everything that I can’t change.”
The duality of absence and presence, visibility and erasure across his work points to the political nature of existence itself in Turkey. Ci is keenly aware of the “undercurrents” bubbling under the surface, the hopes and dreams in between which he articulates with care and subtlety. “Women, the queer, the minorities, and everyone else have to be able to walk these streets freely. As long as this hasn’t been achieved, there is no meaning in anything that we do in this country.” NA
Foam Magazine
Extremes: The Environmental Issue, August 2023
Issue #64
Text by Demet Yıldız Dinçer
Switch Magazine
Feature, April 2023
“Istanbul’s psychogeography and human nature: Ci Demi’s photography”
Text by Clara Massaad
There is no nobler art than telling stories, and as with every art, even storytelling is a challenging mission. One has to find his own aesthetic, style, and imagery and Ci Demi created his visual language to tell stories about his hometown, Istanbul.
Born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, Demi later went on to pursue a degree in Italian language and literature at the University of Istanbul. After University, he started his career working as a copywriter and creative director for different agencies. At 28, he found a calling in the art of visual storytelling, and for a while after he dabbled in music photography and photojournalism before deciding to fully devote himself to telling stories through his artistic projects.
It's at this point in his life and career that he decided to focus his work on Istanbul. Using sceneries of his city Demi concocted versatile series of real-life “episodes” that show us the intimate psychogeography of Istanbul intending to expose the everyday stories that come with it. But, of course, with that peculiar eye that distinguishes him.
Demi is indeed known for the darker artistic edge he adopts to tell his stories. For his visual language, he prominently combines the use of a distinct bright colour palette, originally derived from the Italian 70’s look, along with slight clues to horror cinematography. The intended paradox, however, lies in the timing of his photographs as they hint at gloomy aspects, but are always shot during the daytime.
One of his pictures features, in fact, a cemetery. If we close our eyes and imagine a place crawling with tombs, we will unconsciously be inclined to attribute darker colours and a spooky environment to this visual picture we are drawing in our head. On the other hand, when we look at Demis’s photograph, we see a glowing open shot of a graveyard surrounded by beautiful greenery.
When reflecting however, we realize that the tragedy is even more highlighted than it might be in a traditional funeral-related milieu as it postulates the reality of normalized forgotten human suffering. Demi’s approach is a colourful embrace of a darker side of a “laissez-fair” life mantra. In another shot, he continues capitalizing on a raw canvas of calm nature as he shows us a framed picture of burgundy autumn trees. The colour assortment promotes a glorified depiction of pain. Once again, we see doomsday through the lens of a majestic painting.
Demi is dramatic, yet straightforward. This characteristic of his is communicated in another picture featuring a beaming day shot of a pool covered with nets. Just like the nets, humans get entangled with worldly problems, but even when trying to escape, they sometimes tend to fail and find themselves prisoners of a porcelain neat failed attempt of a way out. Speaking of porcelain, what other than ballet completes the image of refinement? In Demi’s shot, however, the ballerina lies there intensely stretching within an array of mesmerizing colours, fabrics, and dresses and a deafening struggle between discipline, physique, and the weight of brilliant art.
Just like the enchanting ballerina is locked in her reality, another photograph zooms in on a rope locked around a dock anchor like the long-lost missing piece of the puzzle. Indeed, harmony is found within the realms of order As we shift to another photograph, which is an artistic piece belonging to a more extended street series project, we see that tranquillity is part of the routine as well. A working man standing in front of a pink bus in his uniform is as much of a representative of the human paradigm as anyone else.
The following picture is one of a raven landing on a taxi cab ever so effortlessly as a man waking up in the morning and drinking coffee. It is all about the little things in life. Details make up the budling blocks of organization in this world before we enable our adaption to the different circumstances we encounter. However, all paths of human affairs start somewhere, and a photograph showing metal anchors used in the construction of building foundations reminds us of the importance of always remembering our foundations.
Finally, the ultimate shot of windy drapes covering a building reminds us of the spontaneity of the events of the world. The same wind which might start blowing out of nowhere on a regular sunny day might come again blowing on another tragically eventful day. In the end, every shot Ci Demi takes in Istanbul tells us a story, and with these stories, he tells us more about ourselves than the actual images. SM
Zamane İstanbulları (Istanbuls Today)
Exhibition text, December 2022
Text by Serdar Darendeliler
Translation by Yağmur Telaferli
In Signs That Everything Is Going Wrong, Demi not only once again photographs his relationship, bond, and interactions with Istanbul, but also, through the lens of what is happening in his own life, turns the city -which is transformed, covered behind construction screens, kept standing by support, and whose surfaces are constantly renewed- into a story. Demi, who equates Istanbul to a “sinister” surface area and defines the job of taking pictures with this city, in this city, as “photographing an invisible monster”, creates an idiosyncratic corpus of İstanbul’s familiar quirks, with the effect of his colour palette and an almost invariable emotional distance towards his subjects. Zİ
Decalogue Magazine
Feature, November 2022
“The Truth Behind Reality”
Text by Erika Giulietti
If you think the artist’s visual language is complex enough, here’s an invite to grant a closer inspection to the structure of his pictures: “(...) I take clues from the cinematography of classic horror films” — Ci Demi stated — “even though almost all of my photographs take place in the daytime”. The contrast between the pleasing, pastel color palette and the horror inspiration behind Ci Demi’s photographs is something rarely experimented when it comes to photography, but it helps us understanding the reason why we would not struggle to recognise some similarities between the artist’s photographs and the cinematography of the amazingly visually designed Ari Aster’s “Midsommar”. Ci Demi’s photographs are enriched with inventiveness, where different inspirations and elements coming from the artist’s life experience are blended together in order to create his distinctive, intimate own world. DM
Mamut Art Project
Exhibition text, October 2022
Text by Hande Oynar
Translation by Sıla Okur
Unutursan Darılmam (Translation: No Offence If You Forget — Localisation: I Won’t Be Upset If You Forget Me) is a series of photographs that bear the traces of a very difficult period that the artist went through in 2019. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder and taking medication, Ci Demi testifies to a fragile, delicate but at the same time brutally honest relationship with the city. This series, which he focuses on and still continues as he tries to regain his mental health, makes him discover his own colors and perspective with a healing effect. MAP
British Journal of Photography
Tradition & Identity, July/August 2022
Issue 7909
Text by Diane Smyth
Demi describes this book as a ‘photonovella’ and says it will be published soon by Onagöre [page 22], as part of the Turkish publisher’s ongoing series on Istanbul. Demi adds that he is excited about Onagöre’s programme, and by organisations such as Cemre Yeşil Gönenli’s FiLBooks [page 26], a publisher and photobook shop launched by the photographer in the city. But, he says, he often has to look beyond Turkey to make sense of his photography and make a living. Indeed, he has had considerable success internationally, showing his series Will the World End in the Daytime at Les Rencontres d’Arles, and selected as one of the finalists in Encontros da Imagem’s Discovery Awards in 2022 for his series Unutursan Darılmam (I Won’t Be Upset If You Forget Me). But Demi’s work remains embedded in Istanbul — and more than that, in his own way of seeing the city. Unutursan Darılmam stems from a major depression he suffered in 2019, for example, when he spent much of his time at home. “The author seeks melancholic moments; serene, dreary, and sometimes chilling — often restless, but also loving,” he writes. “But also, the body of work documents nothing.” BJP