SARP KEREM YAVUZ (B. 1991) Hayal (“Dream”)

SARP KEREM YAVUZ (B. 1991)
Hayal (“Dream”)
expired large format polaroid film, AI-generated image
unframed: 36 1/5 x 21 2/3 in. (92 x 55 cm.)
Executed in 2024

Provenance
The artist

Literature
Sarp Kerem Yavuz has long explored photography as a means of navigating history, identity, and queerness. Having worked with experimental Polaroid processes since the beginning of his career—his debut series Substitutes for My Father (2013) making him the youngest artist in the history of Istanbul Modern to exhibit and enter its permanent collection—his practice was primarily analog for over a decade. During the pandemic, an inability to travel and a desire to keep photographing led him to artificial intelligence, where he found a new space for storytelling. Using AI-generated imagery as a site for queer possibility, he imagined a present-day Türkiye where the Ottoman Empire never fell, rendering tender and elusive portraits of fictional queer figures who serve as guides, friends, and lovers in this alternate reality.

Under the Sultan’s Eye continues Yavuz’s acclaimed series Polaroids from the Ottoman Empire, which became the first AI-generated series acquired by the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York, the only dedicated LGBTQIA+ museum in the world. Seeking to push beyond the classical dimensions of Polaroid photography, Yavuz traveled to Vienna in October 2024 to collaborate with SUPERSENSE, the company behind the revival of instant film, where he worked with one of the last functional 20x24-inch Polaroid cameras. His AI-generated images were exposed onto expired Polaroid film through an experimental process Yavuz calls “humanwashing”—a fusion of cutting-edge digital tools with profoundly analog methods.

These unique works, some of the first and only large-format AI Polaroids in existence, bear both digital and chemical artifacts due to the unpredictable nature of their production. The nostalgic texture and imperfections of the film create a deceptive sense of documentation, further complicating notions of photographic authenticity. The anachronistic use of Polaroids—an invention that postdates the historical Ottoman Empire—heightens this tension, blurring the boundaries between history and fiction.