Anthropologizing Desire Towards Ontology of the Political
In brief
Studio Teimur Bek Safiuli investigates systems that structure seeing in contemporary image culture. Through systematic series work rooted in institutional critique and visual anthropology frameworks, the practice examines how images acquire meaning through social, political, and technological contexts. Rather than presenting autonomous aesthetic objects, each project stages encounters where meaning emerges from tensions between photographic image, descriptive apparatus, and institutional systems of circulation. The work interrogates algorithmic gatekeeping (This Image), political representation (versos, Lilienstraße), and embedded cultural narratives (Sea Pictures, The Perfect Curve), demonstrating how seeing is always mediated through institutional systems.
Extended
Studio Teimur Bek Safiuli explores how systems shape what and how we see. Working in series‐based photographic and multimedia projects, the practice examines the politics of the image through the lenses of visual anthropology, institutional critique, and the phenomenology of gaze. Rather than treating photographs as autonomous aesthetic objects, each work is conceived as part of a larger investigative structure in which meaning emerges from the tension between image, text, and context.
Across projects, the focus lies on institutions — political, technological, and social — that mediate visual experience. Series such as versos and Lilienstraße extend and contest the typological tradition associated with August Sander, redirecting attention to contemporary forms of political representation and to voices historically underrepresented in (West-)German visual discourse. Other works, including This Image, investigate algorithmic governance by isolating and re‐presenting digital restriction messages that regulate how images circulate on platforms, situating these phrases within the broader history of image–text–based conceptual art.
This practice is grounded in fieldwork and encounter. Portraits, rural and urban spaces, and found visual infrastructures are approached as social documents whose visibility is conditioned by power relations — legal frameworks, platform policies, campaign strategies, and curatorial/managerial decisions. By foregrounding the backs of posters, the margins of campaigns, or the interfaces that warn and obscure, the work seeks out moments where institutional logics become visible at their edges. Each series thus functions as a site‐specific inquiry into how images participate in the construction of public imagination.
Based in Brandenburg and Berlin, the studio engages local contexts as both subject and testing ground. Projects develop over extended periods, often through conversation and collaboration with the portrayed, allowing the work to register layered histories of the city, the former East, and their shifting political landscapes. Exhibited together, the series articulate a coherent investigation into contemporary image culture: how acts of looking are structured, how visibility is granted or withdrawn, and how photography can critically map the infrastructures — architectural, digital, and institutional — that organize what is seen and what remains unseen.