Body Reflections
For Berlin artist Semra Sevin, reality is diverse, based on perspective and reflection, on the background and experience of the one gazing. In this regard, Sevin's photographs capture various levels of perception.
Artist Semra Sevin's sense of self is manifold, splitting into many different people: Sevin speak four languages; She lived and worked with international artists in Paris and Los Angeles and internationally; She grew up in Germany in a multi-cultural household. These experiences have allowed her to see the world through a prism of identity, reflected in a multitude of lights. And with the medium of photography, in the series 'Body Reflections', Sevin intends to explore and share what it means to perceive from a multi-facetted context.
Following Sevin's work with geographical representation, she began to direct these aesthetic and conceptual themes toward portraying nudes representing a variety of skin colors and body images. Within this collection, her focus was on relating the body to the space that it inhabits. How is our mind shaped by our presence in an environment? How does our self echo where it exists? With these questions in mind, Sevin employed further reflective objects as well as projections, merging photographs of bodies with those of scenes, which she considers to be typical for specific cities, such as the green spaces of Los Angeles or the historical cites of Berlin. Here, Sevin created a compounded product, both vibrant and verging on abstraction. Again, the result is painterly, with the contours of the body’s form blending with the curvatures of the reflected effects and the indefiniteness of identity and perception.
Using photography, reflective surfaces, projections and focusing on in camera work; Sevin produced abstract multi-level images, creating softened and distorted representations of the subjects she shoots, comparable to painted work. In their layers and their motion, the pictures challenge a singular definitive explanation, with the intention to invite the viewer to complete the interpretive process with all the cultural backgrounds they bring with them.
