In a place where people have just moved to, the only other people living there are those who can’t move away / Someone arrives in a foreign city. He uses his feet and eyes to create an inner map / People come to places where many apartments are empty / They wait to be notified or deported at night / A person meets people and spends a very long time with them; then he can take photographs – or decide not to.

Fatih Kurçeren’s photographs can only be understood as a particular constellation of spatial and temporal situations: the Ruhr District has a declining population, a high unemployment rate,  housing vacancies in old coal mining residential settlements, immigration influx from an increasing number of new countries, and what is all too frequently an abandoned industrial infrastructure. The photographer approaches his work with his own ‘pre-histories’ gained in the streets of Istanbul.