Mustafa Kemal Kim (b. 1990, Northern 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, blurred, and inconstancy.
A decade later reviewing the archive built by this method sparked a deeper understanding of the work. This led to the Erasure series - a selection of images representing a subtle but deeply felt systematic erasure of identity and belonging.
Recently, reflecting on a lifelong concern for socio-political issues has expanded this practice to include research-oriented documentary projects focusing on geopolitics, memory and identity. The most recent project, Yasak Bölge/Verbotene Zone, covers the landscape of divided Cyprus.