RenownedpPhotographer Renate Graf takes visitors on a tour along the Silk Road in Central Asia, highlighting the contrasts of life, depicted in black and white in her photographs.
Her exhibition “Travel in time and along the Silk Road” was opened by the Institut Français Turquie as well as the embassies of France and Austria in the capital Ankara on Friday. Enthusiasts will be able to visit the exhibition until March 27 at CerModern arts center. The exhibition presents a series of large-format black and white photographs and photographic projections from Graf's travels on the Silk Road through Central Asia and as far as Turkey, from 1993 until 2021. Graf is inviting us to discover the path of history around the Silk Road. The exhibition includes shots from different points of Asia, such as the Himalayan Mountains or historic Uzbek city of Samarkand.
Graf also brings us face to face with the struggle of climate change and environmental transformation, using the power of this exhibition to call on the governments and people of Turkey, France and other countries to act together.
“I carry within me all the dreams of the world, and one of these dreams is to travel through it in order to rewrite it in images ... During these journeys, I drew my inspiration from the register of Sufism, the 'way' as defined by the great poet Rumi. An idea that has never left me across Turkey and to the heart of Central Asia...”
Speaking to Daily Sabah, Graf elaborated that the idea for the exhibition came in the middle of the pandemic in the Uzbek capital Tashkent and was the brainchild of the French ambassador there.
“A lot of photos exhibited here are from a journey that was three and a half months in 1993 starting in China, going through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan – which I adored – India and all the way back to Anatolia – we actually flew out of Istanbul,” she said.
Indicating that she made the journey by car, Graf said: “These were the old days when travel really meant something with no phone and (being) unreachable.”
Speaking on the current exhibition, she mentioned that it was first held in Tashkent and that a small portion of the photos was exhibited in China previously in 2018.
“It was in a beautiful old museum of photography in the middle of the pandemic, with lots of attention and around 200 members of the press,” Graf said, speaking on the exhibition in Tashkent, describing the event as a celebration.
The exhibition of the photographer’s journey through the Silk Road will also be available to art lovers in Istanbul, Graf pointed out, saying that Azerbaijan, Israel and Greece are among the countries also on the list.
Stating that she was 25 years old when her great adventure started, Graf stated that some of the photographs she took will be exhibited in Ankara for the first time, adding, "I felt as if I was the first person to discover the places I visited during my journey. I felt like the explorers of the 19th century. Through these photos, I tried to convey my state of minds in different periods of time."
Sylvie Lemasson, general director of the Institut Français Turquie, in her speech during the opening of the exhibition, described the photos as follows: “These photos in black and white, which evidently do not constitute a choice, take us to contrasts of different corners of the world. We also know that these photos are actually warning us about our fragile ecosystem, but they also invite us to see the play of extremes and contrasts – the contrasts between the sun and the disappearing glaciers, the contrasts between water and drought, the contrasts between fractured earth and sand whirling around.”
Graf was born in Austria. Literature, but also poetry, led Graf to devote herself to photography. During her readings, images arise in her mind and photography helps to document them. Writers and poets such as Fernando Pessoa, Rainer Maria Rilke,
Rabindranath Tagore, T. S. Eliot, Edmond Jabès, Paul Valéry and Hermann Broch are a constant source of inspiration. Cinema also plays an important role in her work.
The artist began to travel with her camera quite early in her life, documenting each trip to environments such as South India, Morocco, China, Alaska, Russia, Yemen, Cambodia, Italy, Germany and Austria.
She started to form travel notebooks with the photos that she attached to handwritings of her chosen texts. These are the artist’s narratives and they serve as testimonies of the travel in a similar vein to the notebook of Delacroix sketched out in Morocco or the diaries of Frida Kahlo.
This process accelerated and led to bigger books bound by the artist herself. Today, Graf’s photographs are known worldwide for their unique chimeric quality accompanied by simplicity.
