Filmmaker Eren Aksu and poet Sheila Maldonado found an immediate bond over personal and familial immigration. Their collaboration is a slideshow that shuffles a broken timeline of text and imagery meeting in the year 2013; signaling Aksu’s emigration from Turkey to Germany and Maldonado’s immigration to the digital world with the purchase of an iPhone. The collected imagery reveals and embraces photography’s analog and digital spectrum as a tool for documentation and how the evolution of the medium impacts subject matter. Making the process both magical and temperamental, analog photography uses a roll of film to capture the image. When loading the film into the camera, the beginning of the reel is typically exposed to light, damaging it and making these first snapshots practice images to be discarded. Aksu welcomes these reject shots, giving them new purpose within the carousel. With the advent of the digital camera synonymous with our phones, the preciousness and documentation practice of capturing milestones and celebrations was forever changed. With her first iPhone, Maldonado finds herself consumed with inventorying all moments, non-occasions — giving new value to time and the generic. Their menagerie of analog and digital imagery and word hum a narrative of misfits, non-occasions and immigration, one where we can all relate to — the foreigner in a new home.

text by Curator Daina Mattis