Mehmet Ali Boran
Video, Photograph and Performance Artist
Political Art
In his works, Mehmet Ali Boran (b.1981) explores security mechanisms’ role in producing the feeling of being safe.
In his early works, Boran held narratives about the masses and their psyche, visualizing their psychological and physical reflexes through video and photographic works around the concepts of identity and belonging.
In his later works, in parallel to themes of militarism, belonging, and memory he explored topics of acquiring food, architectural environment, minery, and displacement. He worked on mediums such as installations, video, photography, and ceramics around these themes. He expanded the role of the storyteller through contemporary mediums to make what’s happening currently heard.
He produced artworks that criticize the politics of border, urban and rural settlements, and technical apparatuses the power has settled to maintain security structures.
Against the anthropocentric understanding of geography, history, and memory, the artist tries to offer an alternative mode of being and through his work wants to regain fresh perspectives tending to animals, water, terrains, stones, air, plants, and cultural remnants.
Instead of the centric perspective, Boran installs fractured and analytical methods and transforms plurality that is already existent in nature and humankind into an objection.
While thinking of Mardin, his current residence, as a metonymy, artist wants to underline what is going on locally is inseparable from the global dimensions.
Being invited to many national and international exhibitions, Mehmet Ali Boran’s work has met art audiences in Istanbul, New York, London, Helsinki, Paris, Berlin, and Vienna.
Also being one of the founders of Mişar Art, an initiative that organizes contemporary art talks, Boran attended to the residence program at Saha Studio which he was invited in 2023.