Leap Into the Future

Sena Başöz’ project “Leap into the Future” revolves around bodies of young and healthy athletes, incarnating the future of the newly founded Republic, clipped out of photographs from the Yapı Kredi Historical Archive “Selahattin Giz Collection”. Encompassing 35,000 photographs, for the most part taken, and merely collected for the remaining proportion by Selahattin Giz (1914-1994) himself, this collection is extremely significant in terms of documenting the social, economic and political atmosphere in the country in the first half of the 20th century. Titled Leap into the Future (2023), this work derives its inspiration from Leap into the Void (1960), the iconic photographic workby French artist Yves Klein (1928-1962). It blends the staging, and emancipating sensation sparked by the movement that emanates from Klein’s photograph with the pictures of athletes Başöz recovered from within the archive. Similar to those often encountered across monuments dating from the same period of the Republic’s infancy, these young athletes’ bodies congregate in this installation, caught in graceful moments of freedom, unrestrained by gravity, reminiscent of the movements of birds disencumbered from the weight of history.