Holland Re-Visioned (Holland Her-Zien)

Galerie Boomerang is proud to present Murat Germen: Holland Re-Visioned (Holland Her- Zien), an exhibition of 27 new works by internationally-renowned Turkish photographer Murat Germen (1965). All photographs on view, created specifically for this occasion, both reflect and play on Dutch art historical traditions of landscape, photography, and nuances of shadow, light, and vision. At the same time, Germen, who holds a Masters in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), explores and re-envisions the architecture and design of Dutch urban scenes, reworking his photographs (taken with Fuji GFX 100 MII medium format camera [100 MP] and Sony A7R5 35mm format camera [60 MP]) through digital processes.

“By the visual reinterpretation of iconic Dutch essentials – canals, houses, cityscapes, and tulip fields --- I seek to highlight the evolving character of these environments in the context of contemporary issues,” Germen says of the works in this exhibition. In this way, he explains, the exhibition forms “a contemporary photographic journey that offers an unusual perspective on the familiar scenes of Dutch cities and countryside, challenging conventional perceptions while inviting the viewer to understand how we inhabit, shape, and redefine the natural and human-made in an age of rapid development.”

The 27 artworks included in this exhibition form part of the artist’s celebrated “Muta- morphosis” and “Facsimile” series. All were created during and following three visits to the Netherlands in October 2023, January 2024, and April 2024, and taken in locations such as Amersfoort, Amsterdam, Delft, Den Haag, Haarlem, Leiden, Lisse/Keukenhof, Rotterdam, and Utrecht, reimagining and simultaneously highlighting the splendor of these vistas through the eyes of the artist and his camera. An additional photograph from Antwerp, Belgium, also taken in April 2024, is included in the exhibition, echoing the historical traditions and interweavings of Dutch-Flemish art.

About the Artist

Murat Germen (1965, Istanbul) received a Masters in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1992, where he also studied at Harvard University. Prior to this, he received a BA in city planning at the Technical University of Istanbul, Istanbul, Turkey. Soon after entering architectural practice, however, Germen turned to photography, a passion since childhood, focusing his camera (literally and figuratively) on the structures of buildings and cities and exploring, as he has stated, “the different traces left by various people and slices of time [that] co-exist as layers in cities that have a particular past.” His work addresses such issues as personal legacy, personal/collective memory conflicts, sustainability, and the dynamics of custody and betrayal. Photographs by the artist are included in the collections of several museums, including Istanbul Modern, Museum Elgiz (Istanbul), the Centre of Contemporary Art in Toruń (Poland), and Benetton Foundation’s Imago Mundi, and have been featured in exhibitions in the USA, Germany, UK, Australia, France, China, Portugal, Japan, and more.