Kerem Ozan Bayraktar's solo exhibition, "Rocks and Winds, Microbes and Words" is concerned with contemplating life on earth. Based on Kerem's recent work The Great Oxidation Event (2019) and questions of variation and diversity, the exhibition will open at SANATORIUM on September 5. The exhibition is curated by Kevser Güler.

Interested in the possibilities of a materialist grounding of the flows and relationships of life, he draws on images of diversity, variation and complexity, and the ideas of movement, transformation and flow that make them possible. The exhibition includes a print and a video in which Kerem examines the "Great Oxidation Event" through illustrations, images, infographics, texts and symbols; portraits of plants, animals and objects that explore the relationship between vitality and movement; and an object installation that explores the transformation of an inorganic substance. Also on view are miniature ambulance works on variation and diversity, as well as possible body images produced with the method of gan drawing. While looking at the transformation and temporality of vital relations on earth, the exhibition invites questions about the possibilities of image transformation and the contemporary understanding of the digital image. Movement and immobility, animate and inanimate, natural and artificial, representation, digital image, data and information are some of the main issues of the exhibition.

"Rocks and Winds, Germs and Words" takes its title from a sentence in Manuel de Landa's book Nonlinear History. Nonlinear History, which Kerem found inspiring, is today one of the powerful works that problematize anthropocentric ontologies, defining matter as an active agent, proposing to think about the relationship between nature and culture starting with the elimination of this duality.

A book is being produced together with the exhibition. The book, which includes paintings by Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, textual works by the exhibition's curator Kevser Güler, philosopher Gaye Çankaya Eksen, artist Sergen Şehitoğlu and a poem by poet Asuman Susam, is designed by Dilara Sezgin.