Litote & Hyperbole

Litote & Hyperbole is a research-based project exploring contemporary forms of portraiture through duration, presence, and the spatial instability of the projected image. The work is founded on a minimal protocol, established and refined through successive iterations: filming a person in a fixed frame, on a slowly rotating platform, for twenty to thirty-five minutes. Each portrait is recorded in a neutral environment, without narrative cues or directional prompts. The person filmed is alone with the camera, experiencing a duration where presence is constructed through repetition, waiting, breathing — through the subtle erosion of the pose. Time is not a container. It is an actor. It reveals what the instant cannot hold. The portrait is not a trace of the real, but an experience of duration — where the “that-has-been” transforms into “that-is-being-constructed”. This protocol has remained stable since its inception, but the dispositif — the spatial form through which the portraits are experienced — has evolved constantly. From early flat-screen projections to the cube-screen installation developed in 2009 and recently presented at the 212 Photography Festival, Istanbul (2024), the research has consistently moved toward spatialization: transforming projection into volume, and the portrait into an immersive experience of presence rather than a surface of representation. The cube-screen (340 × 340 × 250 cm) is a traversable structure composed of translucent vertical slats. Four portraits are projected simultaneously on its surfaces, visible from all sides. The visitor does not stand before the work — the visitor moves through it, inhabiting an unstable field where the image appears and dissolves according to position, distance, and movement.