This is the final project I made for my graduate studio class. It is a series of photograhs that explore and deconstruct the absolute.

 

 

Absolute is not simply a word but a concept that contains various sub-meanings and contexts. My journey with the word began while I was still a philosophy major. I first heard of it during a talk about Hegel. I don't remember the context exactly but I am pretty sure that it had more than a few things to do with the existence, anxiety and above all God. Surely, not only for me, but for anyone who has the slightest interest in functioning of things around them, those subjects must be of great importance. 
 
Nevertheless, thinking about absolute does not necessarily require philosophical thinking skills or a particular knowledge about Hegel and his predecessors. What I have been doing for some time now is only to pick the concept and then think about it broadly by looking at the hints of it visible around me. Basically, my project comprises three different point of views I have about absolute: Death, Religion and Love. This one here is Love.

 

To me, comparing and contrasting are the two most effective ways of exploring a theme thoroughly. Thus, when I think of love, I like to think of it as the unbearable pull between the two opposing poles. When I think about these poles not romantically but politically, I immediately follow the line of thought that the thesis cannot exist without the antithesis. In my bizarre version of love and hate relationship, for instance, a Kurdish gay person admires a fascist fundamentalist politician who is everything that the other one is not. 

 

Note: The other photographs of this part of the project got lost in the process of storing them to an external hard drive. The project will be updated.