Everybody’s Talking 2009 / 2010

Surreal Society

Eda Akaltun, a young artist hailing from London’s renowned St. Martins College for Art and Design, has already won her first prize from the international graphic artists fair Illustrative. With her idiosyncratic fusion of traditional printing techniques and digital collage, she creates designs that range from the subversive to the ironic.

In her abysmal and surreal project based on Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial Akaltun illustrated surreal spaces. She is fascinated by the book’s main character who, so completely torn from his environment by the unjust verdict, experiences his surroundings as extremely hostile, deceptive, and completely warped. With densely convoluted spatial compositions and fictional urban backdrops, Akaltun visualizes the ambiance of complete control described in the story. Traps and spies seem to lurk at every turn, which the illustrator makes appear in shrewd optical allusions. Not masks but rather enormous mouths float before building facades; eyes stare from the walls whose perspectival angles seem ready to tip.

She composes her willful sequences from a mixture of collage printing technique, hand drawings, and digital reworking. Akaltun has a predilection for black-and-white cut-outs from traditional architectural illustrations, which she contrasts with a modern style and orders into a reduced colored background. The well-crafted optical confusion of interiors and exteriors is arranged with breathtaking views and perspectives from both without and within. The nestled blocks of houses and collage-like industrial architecture make any certain orientation impossible. Serial figures and headless individuals sometimes people this surveillance society. The surreal dream world is curious and oddly bizarre; the artist’s invitation to gaze upon it is therefore all the more ironic.

Christina Wendenburg