Respiration, 2019, animation, 3’35”, sound.
Screenings
2021 Digital Aura Open Media Art Festival, The Oil Tank Culture Park, Seoul
2020 PROYECTOR´20 / Festival de Videoarte, Sala El Águila, Madrid
2020 I haven’t told my garden yet, Monitör İzmir
2019 Openhaus (October), 2019, ZK/U, Berlin
2019 A Horn in the Neck, Apartment Project Berlin
2019 Rocks and Winds, Germs and Words, Sanatorium, Istanbul
Respiration (2019) is a 3D-rendered animation that combines encyclopedic entries on oxygen’s role in Earth’s geological and biological history with speculative imagery. The work examines the paradox of oxygen: while it allowed multicellular life to emerge, its introduction during the Great Oxidation Event caused the near-total extinction of anaerobic organisms that once thrived in an oxygen-free atmosphere. This transformation, driven by cyanobacteria’s photosynthesis, altered the planet, paving the way for new lifeforms and eventual human evolution.
In the animation, ambulances are shown immobilized in an icy, desolate landscape resembling Snowball Earth—a period of global glaciation that followed the Great Oxidation Event. Although the vehicles are trapped in the frozen terrain, their flashing emergency lights resemble living organisms, pulsing with a rhythmic vitality that contrasts with their static state. This interplay between motion and stillness reflects a recurring tension in the artist’s works, where seemingly inert objects reveal subtle signs of activity.
Ambulances, commonly associated with immediate interventions to preserve life, are depicted here as dependent on fossil fuels—resources formed from ancient life destroyed during Earth’s transformative history. These vehicles, frozen in ice yet still signaling, connect the geological processes of deep time to the precarities of modern existence. The combustion of fossil fuels in their engines relies on oxygen, tying contemporary crises of energy and survival to the distant past when oxygen reshaped the planet’s conditions for life.
The video’s voice-over, delivered in a hybrid AI-generated language that combines Spanish, Japanese, and other influences, conveys a sense of distance from the present, aligning with the futuristic landscapes depicted.
The emergence of oxygen, which caused the death of many life forms, brought human beings to the world, along with its current inhabitants. When the world was about half of its present age, photosynthesis by cyanobacteria enabled oxygen to spread into the atmosphere and the development of multicellular organisms. Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, in his work “Respiration”, conveys the relationship he established between life and death with a section he presented after the Great Oxidation Event. Death, which is seen as the final stop of all living beings, does not fulfill the last task regarding extinction from the earth and constitutes the steps of the movement. The ambulances in the artist’s work, which are associated with the moments when life is at risk, need energy to move like everything else. The living organisms of time transform over the years and get into circulation of the earth in different states of matter. The original cell that makes up all other cells continues to disintegrate and come together in the infinite form it takes on.
- Nursaç Sargon
2020, Monitör İzmir
2020, Monitör İzmir
“Respiration” (2019) is a video gathering encyclopedic definitions and concepts of historical relations and effects of oxygen respiration on earth. Throughout the video artist’s text is read as voice-over. With this voice in the background, we see an unidentifiable topography evoking post-apocalyptic landscapes of post-Big Oxidation Event ice age, displaying movements of ambulances identified with emergency in urban life, trapped in repetition. With images of death, accident, and unavoidable continuity of uncertainty, the work creates a computer game atmosphere dur to the digital drawing method used by the artist. In his most recent works, Kerem takes the ambulance as an intersection of various modes of existences and processes in the history of earth such as death, energy, life, technology, and language. According to him, the ambulance is an element that complexifies questions on naturality of an artefact, inanimateness of an object, and the life-death relation. Its etymological root being ambulare in Latin, meaning to walk, to move, triggers images of the idea of “motion” which is inherent in its definition. Ambulance, being a motor vehicle, needing energy to move like living beings, uses fossil fuel as energy source that is combusted with oxygen in its engine system. And fossil fuels are remains of dead organisms, living beings.”
- Kevser Güler
2019 Rocks and winds, germs and words
ed. Kevser Güler, Sanatorium, Istanbul
2019 Rocks and winds, germs and words
ed. Kevser Güler, Sanatorium, Istanbul