Overshoot #11 – Kaya & Blank

Kaya Blank, from the collection Second Nature, printed by Kehrer in 2022. Courtesy of the artists and Marshall Gallery.

Yogan Muller:

Let’s begin along with your present present at Basis, in Frankfurt, Germany, after which work recursively to Second Nature, which is how we first related. The title of the present, Infrascapes, factors to what lies beneath neoliberal capitalism’s 24/7 world operations. Tell us about what’s on view and the way you curated this main present.

Kaya & Blank:

On view are tasks that mix video work with photographic objects. We present just about the whole lot that we’ve been engaged on prior to now 5 years.

As you stated, the present focuses on the infrastructure that helps the neoliberal world we stay in. It is the drive and system that propels the products we devour and that fuels our way of life.

Also, as a part of our collaboration with Basis, we are going to present our Second Nature collection at a satellite tv for pc venue in Darmstadt, a neighboring metropolis. We obtained funding from a regional fund that helps creative collaboration amongst cities within the area. We considered Darmstadt as a result of it’s the closest metropolis to the place Thomas grew up. He’s been a member of an artist affiliation there, so the town has this biographical part for him.

Kaya & Blank, exhibition walkthrough, Basis, Frankfurt, Germany. Courtesy of the artists.

Yogan Muller:

To me, night time operates as a clarifying lens in your work. I’m curious to know what first compelled you to work at night time in Southern California, a area recognized for its daylight.

Kaya & Blank:

That positively is Işık’s focus. She got here to the United States after having labored on a photographic collection concerning the development increase in Istanbul, Turkey. It radically remodeled the town that she knew so properly. Construction was happening 24/7. At night time, the development websites had a special high quality; they nearly appeared like staged conditions: unusual types and shapes grew to become extra noticeable, options one would overlook in daylight. When we began working collectively on joint tasks, the primary few concepts she had have been knowledgeable by this nightly framing of the city house.

Kaya & Blank, from the collection SO2F2. Courtesy of the artists and Marshall Gallery.

You’re proper, California is understood for its sunshine. But if you begin dwelling right here, you additionally see the huge gentle air pollution occurring at night time. Because all of Southern California is only one big metropolitan area, there’s a lot gentle that emanates from the city house. It’s unimaginable to not be in awe of this spectacle. Whether it’s the highways which might be so massively lit or the cities themselves, the town blasts a lot gentle again into the night time sky, and when you’re near the coast, the Pacific layer retains actually near us.

Kaya & Blank, from the collection SO2F2. Courtesy of the artists and Marshall Gallery.

So, we figured nighttime seize nonetheless labored for what we needed to deal with right here in California, which occurred to be the infrastructure that, as you stated, operates across the clock.

For us, this nightly, unusual high quality of photos which might be barely enhanced in comparison with what you’d see with the human eye exudes a thriller that’s, on the one hand, haunting and possibly eerie, however on the identical time, stunning. We like working with this stress you get by creating barely otherworldly photos that also look acquainted.

Yogan Muller:

One usually wonders the way you gained entry to sure websites, particularly at night time. Have you ever been approached or questioned whereas working?

Kaya & Blank:

We function from public grounds 100% of the time. We solely very hardly ever go someplace the place we’d like permission to function. We like the thought of discovering photos which might be accessible to everyone.

Kaya & Blank, Intermodal, set up view, Cermak Center, Chicago, IL, USA, 2024. Photo: Jonas Müller-Ahlheim.

In addition, going by the executive means of getting access to locations is usually costly, and we don’t assume it’s price it. We like working with a sure diploma of restriction because it pushes us to provide you with different methods to border our topics. Sticking to public grounds forces you to look and concentrate extra exactly.

For our newest undertaking, Bloom, we have been filming in rural Ohio. We truly had considerably humorous encounters with police forces in quiet rural communities the place often nothing occurs. They have been nearly excited that any individual was there. Because it is extremely totally different from a metropolis like Los Angeles, the place you possibly can inform that the police need to take care of a complete totally different set of calls or a complete totally different set of safety issues, whereas being in New Bavaria, Ohio, the police have been extra, “Oh, hey, finally something’s happening!”

Yogan Muller:

I discover it fascinating that you simply incorporate the environmental markers of our industrial hubris into your photographic course of. For instance, human-made leaves from hid cell antennas seem in your installations, and water you collected close to Long Beach is used to make salt prints. In different phrases, you’re not simply making work concerning the ecological disaster. Your work is product of the very byproducts of the stated disaster. What have you ever discovered by this deep entanglement along with your topics?

Kaya & Blank:

One factor that we actually loved whereas engaged on our latest present in Frankfurt was collaborating with writers. That gave us somewhat little bit of distance from our personal apply, as a result of clearly, if you’re making issues, you possibly can solely get so distant from it.

Kaya & Blank, collected synthetic leaf from a hid cell antenna, from the Second Nature collection. Courtesy the artists.

For us, it has been logical to attempt to mix the video work with the precise supplies that we depict in these photos that really feel so disembodied. We at all times battle to discover a correct phrase for that, however a projected video in an exhibition house simply doesn’t have the presence of an precise object.

Luckily, pictures is a large, broad subject of processes that enables the usage of every kind of supplies, both within the precise photographic course of or by combining these in an set up, as you talked about with the collected leaves.

While engaged on the present at Basis, Deb Chachra, who printed a beautiful e book referred to as How Infrastructure Works (Riverhead Books, 2023), wrote an essay about our work during which she factors out how we concurrently deal with two layers of the identical system. One being what she calls “charismatic megastructures,” just like the Port of Long Beach that’s the topic of Intermodal, and the opposite being the traces left behind by materials flows, a grinding of types if you’ll. I don’t assume we’ve ever considered what we do that method. As we flow into all of those items and all these assets, traces of them detach and are present in waterways, shrouding the environment, and so on. Up till our present at Basis and Deb’s essay, we’ve been making an attempt to indicate each: we flip our lens to techniques one can simply overlook as a result of they’re so huge, and which might be concurrently scattering traces one can simply overlook as a result of they’re so small.

Having each micro and macro scales throughout the identical set up has been on the core of our creative technique and apply for years. For the primary time in Frankfurt, we have been capable of put a number of of our tasks aspect by aspect, learn Deb’s take, and have this “aha!” second. It got here full circle.

Yogan Muller:

Your work blends pictures, video, set up, sound, and appears increasingly to culminate in printmaking, utilizing methods comparable to salt prints, which brings us to the start of pictures on the daybreak of the economic age, we’re now fully engulfed in. This is an open query: are you involved with pictures’s environmental baggage?

Kaya & Blank:

Oh, sure, completely. The different creator and author we have been working with for the exhibition in Frankfurt is Siobhan Angus, whom you interviewed earlier than. She not too long ago wrote a historical past of pictures by the lens of the mine, Camera Geologica (Duke, 2023). We discovered extra concerning the imprint that pictures and the trade behind the whole lot lens-based have had on our planet. This e book has had such an enduring impact on our pondering and apply.

One instance she research is how Kodak realized that cows that eat mustard greens throughout their upbringing have an elevated quantity of sulfur, we need to say of their bones. Once you make gelatin out of these bones, the movie inventory seems superior. A single instance like this goes to indicate the devastating ramifications of pictures. We have already got the phrase “livestock,” which sounds extremely dystopian. But then you might have industrials capitalizing on it and questioning, “Oh, what can I feed these creatures to make better film stock with their bones?” And, in fact, there’s the mining of silver that’s been half and parcel of the photographic trade since its inception, which Angus dissects so incisively in her e book.

Going to in the present day’s use of pictures, which is principally as regular as respiration, all of us have extremely highly effective mini computer systems in our pockets that form our realities, proper? These truthful fictions that we inform one another, that we will take selfies, that we will take pictures of the place we go all through the day, … Imagine, all of us have a large pocket-sized digital pictures archive that’s totally based mostly on the extraction of uncommon earth minerals that need to be mined from someplace, often the worldwide south. It’s an space of the world that we are likely to maintain out of our notion, as a result of, someway, it feels really easy to deal with how gentle and modern these digital gadgets appear and feel. But, once more, what’s inside them wants to come back from someplace.

Kaya & Blank, nonetheless from Intermodal, video set up. Image courtesy of the artists and Marshall Gallery.

Kaya & Blank, Intermodal, set up view of Infrascapes, Basis, Frankfurt, Germany, 2026. Grid of salt prints made by the artists. Image courtesy of the artists.

We take into consideration these points lots, and so they would possibly discover a method into our apply and tasks sooner or later. In hindsight, we’ve by chance adopted the historical past of pictures by exploring heliographic prints constructed from bitumen first, and went on to make salt prints. Now, we would bounce to uncommon earth typically quickly, who is aware of?

Yogan Muller: 

Second Nature was printed in 2022 by Kehrer. In this collection, you flip your lens to cell antennas disguised as bushes. They are in all places in LA. I recall from our conversations in the course of the pandemic that it was an epic undertaking to seize.

Kaya & Blank:

It began as a undertaking of curiosity. Neither of us had ever seen these bushes earlier than, and Işık obtained obsessive about them. They’re so unusual if you’ve by no means seen them earlier than.

Kaya & Blank, from the collection Second Nature, printed by Kehrer Verlag in 2022. Courtesy of the artists and Marshall Gallery.

We’d take pictures of them each time we might see one on the aspect of the road, or any individual would tell us, “Ah, there’s one out there, check it out!” But initially, it didn’t transcend that amusement, and consequently, we weren’t making a lot progress with the undertaking.

Suddenly, the pandemic hit. Through analysis, we discovered that these cell antennas you possibly can see throughout Los Angeles, mounted on buildings or on towers, are geotagged on cell supplier maps. You can log on and test the place the closest cell antenna is. That stated, the draw back of those maps is that they don’t present which antennas are disguised as bushes or mounted plain and easy on a tower. During the primary few weeks and months of the pandemic, we perused these maps and checked each single marker on them, utilizing Google Street View to verify if it was a tower or hid as a tree. Over just a few months, we put collectively a customized map that we used to work our method by the city panorama and {photograph} them. Overall, we visited near 1,200 cell towers in Southern California, from the Mexican border to Bakersfield. We created this big archive of cell tower bushes, principally photographed at night time. And then we compiled the ultimate choice edit, which grew to become the e book Second Nature, printed by Kehrer.

This research-driven course of laid the inspiration for what we do in our newer tasks: we often create an in depth visible archive and condense it over time.

Yogan Muller:

We share related trajectories as itinerant artists, heading from Europe. We name LA dwelling. Do you keep in mind if you felt deeply that LA was the place you may thrive as artists?

Kaya & Blank:

We didn’t really feel it till we had lived right here for some time, to be sincere. Işık and I each landed in San Diego first.

Işık obtained her MFA from UCSD, and Thomas was a Visiting Scholar by a analysis grant from the German Academic Exchange Service. That’s how we met. We spent the primary years of our lives in San Diego, till Işık graduated. And the humorous factor is that we had been to Los Angeles many, many instances over time, however we often ended up in areas that aren’t too interesting: industrial parks, the ports, and websites with a lot of extractive industries. We truly didn’t need to transfer to L.A. Işık discovered a job there, so we finally did, and, humorous sufficient, the town grew on us. Seeing it as a resident clearly offers you a really totally different lens on the place you might be.

As many individuals have written about Los Angeles and commented on Los Angeles, it’s a metropolis of cities. It’s a large outgrown city system, and a few elements are tough and industrial, whereas different areas are extremely stunning. The beauty of it being such an enormous system is that you could find your pockets. We are fairly pleased with the place we ended up within the metropolis.

It looks like a serendipitous scenario that we discovered one thing with out looking out, and we simply ended up in a spot the place we had been pleased to be for the previous few years.

Yogan Muller:

Is there a backstory behind your Kaya & Blank alias?

Kaya & Blank: 

The quite simple backstory is: it’s our final names. We figured Blank & Kaya didn’t sound as good. Kaya & Blank has a very good ring to it. It’s a lot simpler than writing our full names, particularly since Thomas has a center title that’s awkwardly lengthy. Kaya & Blank felt like a catchy title.

Yogan Muller:

What does photographing in a warming world imply to you?

Kaya & Blank: 

Don’t neglect the sunscreen?

More critically, it’s a query that we nonetheless attempt to wrap our heads round. Our work sheds gentle on the infrastructure that has a direct hyperlink to our warming world. Yet, we additionally know these techniques preserve our comfortable and cozy way of life.

We really feel conflicted. On the one hand, now we have a deep appreciation for the science and engineering genius behind it. It is usually jaw-dropping. For instance, when you take a look at a port, you possibly can’t deny the ingenuity, engineering, and scale. It’s awe-inspiring. On the opposite hand, we’re properly conscious of the consequences of those techniques and the ecological ramifications of their functioning.

That stated, now we have very clear emotions in the direction of the politics behind all of it and the way they’re a manifestation of energy constructions. These techniques ought to profit all of us, which isn’t the case. So social justice at all times hovers round what we do. We keep in mind how our warming world is disproportionately affecting individuals within the world south. Climate change is rather more of a hazard to human life in locations the place climate situations are altering quickly. We are feeling it over right here as properly… Los Angeles noticed full-blown environmental disasters currently, too.

We, in fact, want we had a extra fast impact on politics, individuals’s lives, on collective pondering and motion, however there’s a really clear restrict to what our work can obtain to alter this example.

Kaya & Blank are lens-based media artists whose work explores the methods during which people form and inhabit the world. The affect of neoliberal politics on the way in which we stay has been an vital a part of their apply in recent times. Their tasks usually deal with traces of financial infrastructures to look at politics in constructed environments and the way humanity’s dominance over nature finds its manifestation in on a regular basis structure. In their work, they erase the bodily distance in between present constructions and create dense compilations of business fragments to assemble new landscapes that look each alien and acquainted on the identical time.

Deeply grounded in documentary practices, their strategy is characterised by a robust emphasis on analysis. However, by pushing the boundaries of how actuality may be depicted, they transcend the area of illustration and create fully unbiased, usually hyperreal visible worlds. As a consequence, the boundaries between actuality and fiction of their work turn into blurred. By framing their topics nearly solely at night time, they goal to intensify the substitute and uncanny qualities of latest city environments. This visible technique usually has the impact that the documentary elements of the works are interpreted by viewers as computer-generated photos.

In exhibitions they flip their analysis and discoveries into multi layered installations. Photographs and movies are continuously supplemented by texts and objects. Their work usually has a direct materials connection to the subjects depicted of their movies and pictures. By creating these advanced, spatial compilations, they provide spectators an immersive expertise that in equal measures exhibits conceptual depth in addition to a rigorous formal execution.

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Yogan Müller is a French photographer, first-generation graduate, researcher, and educator. His work engages with ecological overshoot and its impression on landscapes, assets, and communities.

Research, important approaches to panorama, fieldwork, and design are central to his course of. He works with pictures, photogrammetry, drones, and the e book type.

After the surprising lack of his father in February 2022, belonging, identification, and fractured roots are themes that got here to the fore.

In October 2019, he moved to Los Angeles and joined the UCLA Design Media Arts (DMA) Counterforce Lab. He taught pictures, photogrammetry, AI, and drones at DMA between 2020 and 2024.

In November 2018, he graduated with one of many first practice-based PhDs in Photography from ENSAV La Cambre and Université libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

His work seems within the collections of Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF, Paris), the Getty Museum (Los Angeles), and personal collections.

Yogan has taught at UCLA DMA, the Penumbra Foundation in New York, and the University of Bordeaux in France.

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