Meral Güler is a British-Irish visual artist and filmmaker whose work is a visual exploration of the struggle of the human condition and embodies a spirit of resilience through imagined landscapes. Rooted in her dual heritage from an Irish mother and a Turkish father, her practice is a focused engagement with the impermanence of existence and the resilience of memory.
Her project-based work begins with analogue photography, working with the negative as a physical and chemical record. She then undertakes a transformative act of re-creation using light, form, and digital tools to build new narratives. This act of building is central to the work, as it physically embodies the urge to remember and the compulsion to forget, seeking to reinvent what was and what is. The work examines the intersections of past and present, the imagined and the real, and prompts questions about perception itself.
Meral holds an MA in Fine Art from Chelsea School of Art (UAL) and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from the University of Middlesex, London. Her work has been widely exhibited in the UK and internationally, with notable presentations at institutions and galleries such as the BFI in London, the Benaki Museum in Athens, and the Julius Schulman Gallery in Los Angeles. She was the inaugural recipient of the Landskrona Foto & Breadfield Award for her photo book collaboration, You Would Be Earth. Works by the artist are held in permanent and private collections across the United Kingdom and Europe.
View : artist's CV/ 2023
INSIGHTS INTO PRACTICE & IMPACT
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“Alive. So seems the photography and the attention that Meral Güler gives to the environment and what appears or performs within it. Relentless and irreverent,
sometimes ironic and subtle, the artists ignores the canons of wink, judicious and politically correct aesthetic to give vent to a personal poetic voice. Her scathing style reflects the need for scraping from the social conscience the last crumbs of humanity.
Shots that express a deep subjectivity and a desire not to surrender to reality”.
Steve Bisson, Founding Editor, Urbanautica Institute
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“Unlike a written story, with a beginning, middle and an end, Meral Güler photographs a point in a segment of an event. She has the ability to be able to choose that particular point, which could be seen as the center of a star-shaped beam. She is the fulcrum on which many stories, more or less related, randomly cross. This is the evocative power of her images. She does not pass through the aesthetic but manages to concentrate a great intensity of balances in her images, compressing information to the point that almost seem ready to explode”.
Claudio Starita, Art Journalist
Steve Bisson, Founding Editor, Urbanautica Institute
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“Unlike a written story, with a beginning, middle and an end, Meral Güler photographs a point in a segment of an event. She has the ability to be able to choose that particular point, which could be seen as the center of a star-shaped beam. She is the fulcrum on which many stories, more or less related, randomly cross. This is the evocative power of her images. She does not pass through the aesthetic but manages to concentrate a great intensity of balances in her images, compressing information to the point that almost seem ready to explode”.
Claudio Starita, Art Journalist