{
  "$type": "site.standard.document",
  "bskyPostRef": {
    "cid": "bafyreif4d2i2aaln5327qqzjgg4h7ppx6q4mac2ysvevne5cwrwrrymiry",
    "uri": "at://did:plc:cdbfjkvpgmn2ginhgej4czf3/app.bsky.feed.post/3miq65zi4nzg2"
  },
  "coverImage": {
    "$type": "blob",
    "ref": {
      "$link": "bafkreihyh5x7t2ueigqxvlvhmfumsoaub3nsxrvaqjbo6grp3iam7tnnxe"
    },
    "mimeType": "image/webp",
    "size": 132856
  },
  "description": "basis e.V. presents Infrascapes, the first comprehensive solo show by Kaya & Blank. Night photography, salt prints, and living algae. Curated by Lukas Picard",
  "path": "/kaya-blank-infrascapes-basis-frankfurt-exhibition-current/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-04-05T06:55:07.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.munchiesart.club",
  "tags": [
    "basis e.V.",
    "Işık Kaya and Thomas Georg Blank",
    "basis e.V. in Frankfurt",
    "Instagram Basis e.V, Frankfurt",
    "Kaya & Blank on Instagram",
    "Lukas Picard on Instagram",
    "catapult.art",
    "Submit your work →",
    "Artist in Focus",
    "Read More",
    "Exhibition",
    "Interview"
  ],
  "textContent": "**Infrascapes - basis e.V.**\n\n**Artists:**\nKaya & Blank\n\n**Exhibition:**\nInfrascapes\n\n**Venue:**\n\nbasis e.V.\n\n\n**City:**\nFrankfurt, Germany\n\n**Dates:**\nFebruary 13, 2026 - May 10, 2026\n\n**Address:**\nGutleutstrasse 8–12, 60329 Frankfurt, Germany\n\n**Curated by:**\nLukas Picard\n\n**Photography:**\nKaya & Blank\n\n**Image Courtesy:**\nCourtesy the artists and basis e.V.\n\n**Contact:**\npresse@basis-frankfurt.de\n\n# basis e.V. Presents Infrascapes by Kaya & Blank, Frankfurt\n\nThe systems that keep industrial societies running tend to disappear from sight precisely because they are everywhere.\n\nThey become landscape, background noise, infrastructure that reads as nature. Işık Kaya and Thomas Georg Blank work in that gap between what sustains us and what we choose not to see.\n\n> Photography was never innocent of the extraction it depicts. Kaya & Blank turn the medium against itself - exposing industrial landscapes on the very materials those landscapes have consumed.\n\nbasis e.V. in Frankfurt occupies a position in the city that already carries this ambivalence: Gutleutstrasse lies in the Gutleutviertel, a former industrial quarter adjacent to the Main riverfront, close to the port and logistics infrastructure that still defines Frankfurt's western edge.\n\nThe decision to stage the first comprehensive exhibition of Kaya & Blank here is not incidental, the building itself sits within the logic the artists are examining.\n\n**Crude Aesthetics** , installed in the first room, sets the terms. A video work trains its gaze on the oil pumps and refineries embedded in the urban fabric of Los Angeles, a city where petroleum infrastructure appears alongside suburban streets, shopping plazas, and drive-throughs as if it always belonged.\n\nAlongside the video, heliograph plates hold images of that same culture: Carvana vending machines, interstate systems, parking lots.\n\n****Kaya & Blank****,  __Crude Aesthetics__ , exhibition view,****basis e.V.**** , 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank.****Kaya & Blank,**** __Crude Aesthetics__ , exhibition view, ****basis e.V.**** , 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank****Kaya & Blank****,  __Crude Aesthetics__ , exhibition view, ****basis e.V****., 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank.\n\nThese photographs were made using bitumen collected from the La Brea Tar Pits, the same naturally occurring petroleum tar that Joseph Nicéphore Niépce used in what is considered the earliest surviving photograph, created around 1826.\n\nThe technical choice carries an argument: photography, from its first moment, was a material practice entangled with extraction.\n\n**Intermodal** occupies three rooms and takes the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach as its subject, the largest port complex in the United States, moving more than 15 million containers each year.\n\n****Kaya & Blank,**** __Infrascapes__ , exhibition view, basis e.V., 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank.Kaya & Blank,  __Intermodal__ , exhibition view, basis e.V., 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank.Kaya & Blank,  __Intermodal__ , exhibition view, basis e.V., 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank.****Kaya & Blank****,  __Intermodal__ , exhibition view, ****basis e.V.**** , 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank.\n\nThe salt prints here expose scenes of container ships on the horizon, leisure beaches framed by oil rigs, tankers moving through ordinary light.\n\nBut the paper on which these images were exposed was soaked in seawater drawn directly from those ports. The chemical contamination of the collected water leaves faint residues in each print, the pollution of the image is the pollution of the place.\n\nThe salt print process, developed in the nineteenth century, opens a historical dimension that runs alongside the contemporary scale: the infrastructure of global sea trade is as old as the photographic medium that now records it.\n\n****Kaya & Blank****,  __Bloom__ , exhibition view, basis e.V., 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank.****Kaya & Blank****,  __Bloom__ , exhibition view, basis e.V., 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank.Kaya & Blank,  __Bloom__ , exhibition view, basis e.V., 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank\n\n**Bloom** shifts register. The work moves inland to Ohio and the Great Lakes region, where monoculture corn production on an industrial scale produces a secondary consequence: excess fertiliser enters surrounding waterways and triggers algal blooms.\n\nKaya & Blank developed a method of exposing photographs using living algae, a process that takes days, during which the images literally grow and require attention.\n\nThe resulting works hold their own fragility against the retro-futuristic grain bins they depict. The procedure produces images of monoculture from a process that monoculture itself generates as waste.\n\nKaya & Blank,  __Stream__ , exhibition view, basis e.V., 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank.****Kaya & Blank****,  __Stream__ , exhibition view, ****basis e.V****., 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank.\n\n**Monuments** and **Stream** continue the reckoning, with further documentation of the infrastructural architectures that define the North American landscape at night, towers, pipelines, motorways, rendered in a visual language that holds the distance of observation rather than the intimacy of critique.\n\nThe nocturnal frame is not atmospheric styling; it is a formal decision that removes the human figure and allows the scale of these systems to read without mediation.\n\n****Kaya & Blank****,  __Monuments__ , exhibition view, ****basis e.V.**** , 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank.Kaya & Blank,  __Monuments__ , exhibition view, basis e.V., 2026. Courtesy of the artists and basis, Frankfurt. Photo: © Kaya & Blank.\n\nFossil fuel consumption has not declined in line with the rhetoric surrounding it. The persistence of petro-culture, as the exhibition text notes, runs parallel to the accumulation of its traces, microplastics, contaminated waterways, algal blooms, carbon in the atmosphere.\n\nKaya & Blank bring those traces into the image itself, making the photograph not a representation of extraction but a product of it. Whether that reframing changes how we encounter these landscapes, or merely adds another layer of knowing distance to them, the exhibition does not resolve.\n\nInstagram Basis e.V, Frankfurt\nKaya & Blank on Instagram\nLukas Picard on Instagram \n\n**About Catapult**\n\nThis is an artist interview published by Catapult — an independent editorial platform for contemporary art, based in Vienna. We publish exhibition reviews, artist features, interviews, and critical context, with a focus on emerging and mid-career practices from Europe and beyond.\ncatapult.art\n\nWant to be featured? Submit your work →\n\n* * *\n\n## Related Readings\n\nArtist in Focus\n\n## Martha Kicsiny: Light, Power, and the Material Weight of the Cloud\n\nRead More\n\nExhibition\n\n## Kyriaki Goni with Telling the Bees at The Breeder, Athens\n\nRead More\n\nInterview\n\n## Mark Van Wagner Paints with Sand and Lets Time Do the Rest\n\nRead More",
  "title": "What Does the Image Owe to the Oil That Made It?",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-05T06:57:09.952Z"
}