Work by ASAU PhD student at 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale  

The Türkiye Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale will include photographic works by PhD student and artist Serkan Taycan, in its exhibition Grounded.

The three works —a quadriptych, a diptych, and a single image — are part of a photography project titled Shell, carried out by Taycan between 2010 and 2012, in which he documented the urban expansion of Istanbul.

“At the time, a significant amount of construction was taking place on the periphery of the city, and the environmental, social, political, and economic implications of this phenomenon were not well understood by Istanbulites,” he explains.

“I wanted to witness, capture, and share the ongoing transformation,” he says. “These were places where brutal images of this transformation were visible. I started to walk around these areas and take photographs with an open mind, to carry out a loose form of research.”

Curated by Ceren Erdem and Bilge Kalfa, Grounded approaches soil as a carrier of ecological and cultural memory. The 2025 Biennale runs from May 10 to November 23.

Taycan, a PhD student at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, is one of 20 individual and team participants presenting work at the Türkiye Pavilion.

Shell has previously been exhibited in Türkiye, France, Germany, and Finland. It was the origin of Taycan’s Between Two Seas project.