perspective
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movement and space making practices
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author, camera as an author and gaze
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dialogues
artistic statement
Yürekli is interested in analog photography since her childhood and recently expanding her experiment towards digital photography, post production- manipulation experiments and AI interpretation. She seeks interrelations and dialogues between object, material, light as well as architecture and society.
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For her, city and architecture are elements of photography in scale; while smovement, light and double exposure are the main projection tools for visual procjection. Her perspective is production of photoghraphic image with academic and research based understanding and developing image as a ‘found’ object.
extended biography
Melike Yürekli (b. 1996) graduated from Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ) in 2020 and completed Architecture Master’s Program at Middle East Technical University in 2023, writing her thesis on modern architecture and its mapping including archival documentation and visualization with knowledge projections. During her studies modes of representations and city-place-space discussions became her interest. In 2022, she continued her studies for the Erasmus+ Program at the Politecnico di Milano.
Besides working with different architectural offices for competitions, conceptual research and restoration, revitalization projects for historic sites, she served as an editor for an architectural magazine, Yapı Dergisi, and worked as a designer for TAK, an interdisciplinary initiative focused on sustainability of collective life in historic neighborhoods. She developed a project for documenting and increasing accessibility to Kadıköy's collective memory, exhibited in 2019. She also got a grant from Akbank Sanat and Open Dialogue Istanbul for Curating Contemporary Art Program in 2020 and her project ‘In Absence’ realized online in 2021 and exhibited in Akbank Sanat Taksim in 2024. She worked as a museum assistant and project coordinator in Elgiz Museum between 2022-2023, be part of the realization of exhibition projects, international artist residencies, open calls... She was co-curator of “I am the bridge between what is and what could be. What am I?” exhibition.
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Currently photographic triology #stranger is presented in EskiÅŸehir, Yer Community's VALLUS exhibition.
Her interest in photography started during childhood with an analogue camera. Yürekli is drawn to dialogues in between movement and double exposure; reflection and light as a meaning derived from city and unreadable situations. She uses photography as a part of bodily movement in her life and takes snapshots during the long walk of city exploration, capturing normal as anomalies, regular for deconstruction. Currently, continues her artistic and curatorial search independently.
Her academic and photographic production entangled from many respects and shows parallel intentions. Her thesis entitled "Mapping Modern Campuses: An Imaginative Projection Backward in Time," draws inspiration from Michael Hays’ words, aims to map a specific network of modernism through its operational projections. She studied the concept of projection in light of Robin Evans to provide a visual and historical tracing within the framework of architecture. Through the research, mapping is interpreted in multiple contexts and is seen as a research tool, interface, and visualization problem for revealing the network and its vast data. The study considers the unique assemblage of each campus, including the architect's intent, institutional requirements, regional and physical environment, social and political influences, cultural context, material availability, and usage by students, professors, and staff. The study focuses on five selected campuses and investigates their visual and textual data to create a campus diagram that embodies the actors, agencies, and networks involved in visual projections, while retaining the architects' own representational language. This study applied deconstruction and reconstruction processes to the original METU Campus diagram to uncover its architectural layers and trace these layers' connection to modern architecture in four other campuses. During master studies she worked with Prof. Dr. AyÅŸen SavaÅŸ, coordinator of the Getty Keeping It Modern Project for METU. Yürekli participated to the "Campus Utopias" joint project with TU Delft and assisted teaching courses such as Architecture and Different Modes of Representation and Digital Volume Exhibition...