Banu Cennetoglu : Catalog / Katalog

CATALOG was originally conceived to function as a mail order catalog for 6 months in the Turkish Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale. The piece contains 450 of my photographs dated between 1994-2010, classified under 15 categories, varying from personal photographs to iconic images such as 9/11, documentation of the Turkish Parliament, and of the UN zones between North and South Korea. They are all framed the same way, questioning the hierarchy among them, embedding a bit part of their content into the thickly bound book, while somehow trying to co-exist with the others in keeping their self-referentiality. The categories are defined by subjective parameters, each holding a different number of images. During the Biennial, viewers could download any of the photographs for free from the catalog by taking a form home and imputing the photograph’s code.