By Heidi Trautmann

You remember the Cypriot Traveller Exhibition in the Ismet Güney Art Centre? Or the “Clean-the-Beach-Activity-for-the-Turtles”?  Activities on the banner of Tagmac Cankaya and his group of friends. He has something on his mind. Always. I like that. I believe it is to change the way of thinking of people, to ask them to travel around an object, a theme, and consider it from all sides, with often unusual angles. A fresh approach. Now he and his friend Kerim Belet have spent deeper thoughts around the smoke of cigarettes.  I cannot say it better than Johann Pillai with the following words:

DUMANEX is an exhibition of images  of smoke that contain within them a mixture of metaphors evoking different meanings and images from life, such as escaping, disseminating, communicating, getting lost, flying, dirtying, and smelling.  

The DUMANEX exhibition at Sidestreets on 13-22April 2011 presents images by Kerim Belet and Tağmaç Çankaya,  two young photographers who are working to transform audience perception by representing these metaphors visually.

Their works use the language of photography to go beyond simple photographic representations of reality, abstracting the ideas of framing and perspective and creating images of atmospheric possibilities. The result is a photography that evokes moods and moments, and whose message emerges through the various connotations and contradictions that arise in the context of smoke.

I am sure quite a number of people who came to the opening were inspired, perhaps to think twice before they do a project approach of their own.

You know what makes me think twice? It is that out of a thing of no great importance, out of a fleeting moment, you can create something beautiful to make you stop and perhaps say to yourself…Oh, there are so many more precious little things waiting to be discovered.