Bülent Ümit Erutku MY SILENT WITNESSES Online Juried Solo Photography Exhibition, 22 December 2025 - 05 January 2026

Marmara University Traditional Handicrafts and Design Application and Research Center (GESTUAM), within the scope of its individual exhibition events, brings together art lovers with the Online Juried Personal Photography Exhibition titled MY SILENT WITNESSES by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bülent Ümit Erutku, a faculty member of the Marmara University Faculty of Fine Arts. 

For me, trees are primarily visual manfestations of the natural spirit of a natural world. They are markers, like a passage where fear and excitement, joy and pan, loss and existence intertwine. I've been photographing sections for years. Throughout my photographs, they have become more of an internal day than a representation. Regular and clear trees have become intermittently dissolved and blurred, as if the warmth of memories melts away under their cold touch.

Each tree has become a silent witness to an emotion, a moment, a tension. It's as if they reflect the relationships I've established —or haven't established— with my surroundings. Their roots reach underground, their branches into the ambiguty. Colors and forms sometimes shrouded in a scream of rage, sometimes in the flames of passon. Some frames have transformed into a cold chill, a dystopian stillness. The "state of not being" hovers at the heart of this series; my photographs hover between the present and the absent, reality and fantasy, the past and the present. Each one, for me, is a kind of "carpe diem" call: a visual response to capturing the moment, to being able to touch life despite its transience.

A movement, a layer of time, is hidden in every frame. Trees, even when they die, bear powerful and silent witness to the fragile surface of a being that remains standing tall. This evokes two contradictory emotions simultaneously: a chill and peace. I strive to use the camera as a tool of intuition rather than a tool of documentation. With this exhibition, I want to remind you that, amidst the layers of time and memory, photography is not a mere representation, but a testimony bearing the emotional resonance of existence, on that fine line between warmth and cold, presence and absence.

Bülent Ümit Erutku 

Exhibition Poster.jpg (1.23 MB)

Exhibition Catalog.pdf (5.30 MB)