basis e. V. presents the first comprehensive solo exhibition by the duo Kaya & Blank. In their photographs, videos and multi-layered installations, the Los An- geles-based artists expose the infrastructures of capitalist production and ways of life.
Pumps, pipelines and refineries for fuel, ports, container ships and motorways for the transport of goods, endless monocultures for biofuel and food, data cen- tres and radio towers for communication: our societies are driven by systems that work non-stop. Systems that span, shape and consume our world.
The nocturnal photographs and videos by Işık Kaya and Thomas Georg Blank fo- cus on these critical architectures of neoliberal industry. In doing so, they find a visual language that allows for narrative distance. With uncanny simultaneity, they show processes that keep our industrial world running, while destroying it at the same time.
Through an intensive examination of the resources whose exploitation their works reveal, Kaya & Blank develop their own photographic processes and expose their motifs on bitumen, sea salts and living algae cultures. In this way, the historical role of photography as an instrument of human domination over nature is rene- gotiated.
The exhibition at basis e. V. comprises five series of works; a sixth series, ‘Se- cond Nature,’ will be on display in April 2026 in cooperation with the Sezession Darmstadt on the grounds of the Künstler:innenhaus Ziegelhütte and will be complemented by an artist talk at the Kunsthalle Darmstadt.
Işık Kaya and Thomas Georg Blank (*1990)
The Turkish and German Duo of lens-based media artists, lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA. Since its formation in 2019, the duo has participated in institutional exhibitions and international festivals such as Athens Photo Festival (GR), Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), San Diego Art Institute (ICA San Diego), CE- AAC Strasbourg (FR), Lishui Art Museum (CN), Contemporary at Blue Star (USA), PHOTO 2024 in Melbourne (AUS), Fondazione MAST Bologna (IT), and Kunsthalle Basel (CH) among others. As artists in residence at The Internet Archive, they created a poetic glimpse into the empty headquarters of the institution in San Francisco during the fall of 2020. In 2022 the duo developed a method to grow photographs from living algae during a residency at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester.
Their photographic series “Second Nature” about cell towers disguised as trees and palms in Southern California has won numerous awards and gained interna- tional recognition after having been published as a monograph by Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg in 2022.
