Simultaneously familiar and alien — many people have an ambivalent feelings whenever they encounter functional buildings, a diffuse discomfort. These buildings for temporary as well as permanent use are so omnipresent that we almost do not notice them anymore. There are parts of cities so infiltrated with them, that they become diffuse.

The photographer Aras Gökten has sought such places with his camera. He found them at trade-fairs, in shopping centers, at airports and in all kinds of real estate development plans. He shows shopping spaces, poster walls, homes and event halls right beside so-called green spaces — a staging of model-like artificiality, internationalized, exchangeable, yet representing in a symbolic way the dystopian nature of these kinds of buildings. In the midst of this: individuals who seem lost. Here and there, something organic interferes with this strict geometry. There is a man set up in a construction resembling a hamster wheel, a poster wall with an alpine panorama and a tree planted in the midst of the asphalt.

Arkanum
Aras Gökten

Self-published
October 2014

64 pages

Edition of 250