Alper Aydın, 1989

Born in 1989 in Ordu, Alper Aydın majored in sculpture at Gazi University, Fine Arts Teaching Department, and graduated in 2011. He completed his master’s degree with a thesis entitled “Land Art in Turkey”. Currently living and working between Ordu, Ankara, Konya, and Istanbul, Aydın focuses on photography, sculpture, installation, and land art. Contemplating and exploring nature, which is so integral to humanity, he produces works around this theme. Through the interventionist perspectives of humans, which include accumulation, measurement, and classification, he reinterprets the soil on which we live, and which renews itself, changes, and evolves.

Inspired by the geological past, Aydın plays with perspective by performing physical or digital interventions in soil, sea, and stones. His conceptual productions involve architecture, geology, sociology, mythology, geography, and archaeology, as well as collecting, accumulating, documenting, and archiving.

“Stone Library” is like a treasure trove of information composed of found stones that he came across in diverse structures during his explorations in various parts of Turkey. Each stone was once used by people in the construction of diverse buildings, in caves, or in objects such as arrow- and spearheads. As a consequence of how they were formed, the properties inherent to the stones go hand in hand with the geological features of the region where they were found, and one may deduce a sociological conclusion from the ways in which they were used. Implying that the stones store knowledge about the past of nature and humankind, to which we cannot have immediate access, the artist lines them up aesthetically, somewhat like books on shelves, in accordance with the golden ratio, which has been used by artists for centuries. The stones’ sculptural forms reference the biological and zoological infrastructure of Turkey’s geographical landscape.