Mustafa Kemal Kim (b. 1990, north Cyprus) is a self-taught photographer working between documentary and abstracted image-making. After moving to Berlin in 2013, replacing a compact camera with a DSLR led to his first experiments.
  A disobedience toward common photographic practices fueled a resistance to "freezing" a scene. Instead, moving the camera and manipulating what was visible to the naked eye became the primary focus. Treating light as an active subject matter rather than a passive source of illumination resulted in images that represented his vision at the time: introspectively distorted and blurred, capturing the constancy of inconstancy.
  A decade later, a retrospective review of the archive built by this method sparked a deeper understanding of the work and led to the Erasure series—a selection of images representing a subtle but deeply felt systematic erasure of identity, alongside alienation and (non)belonging.
  Reflecting on a lifelong concern for socio-political issues, recently has expanded this practice to include research-oriented documentary projects focusing on geopolitics, memory, and identity.
  Yasak Bölge/Verbotene Zone, as the most recent project, covers societal and political landscapes within divided Cyprus.