Turkish artist Sarp Kerem Yavuz had a busy few months abroad. He built İznik tiles with LEGO for two weeks at Maxx Royal in Bodrum after securing the final slot in the new luxury resort’s inaugural summer Arts Connected residency, which hosted fellow New Yorkers Chloe Wise, Emma Stern and Jenna Gribbon. He developed a new model of analog-cum-A.I. photography at Supersense’s Polaroid studios in Vienna days before displaying his prints across town at the capital’s historic Volkstheater, where he had been invited to host back-to-back talks about his latest series of blown-up nudes at the first official TED conference dedicated to artificial intelligence, before packing them up for a second show during Contemporary Istanbul, where he curated this year’s Dialogues series. The success of his European tour was at odds with the expectation of any good news back. Yavuz was only able to travel overseas because he was appealing his denied green card application for the second time.
What good is showing on the walls of Soho House Istanbul, which exhibited Yavuz’s portraits across two floors of the leased-out former U.S. Consulate, when the members club’s superpower landlord seemingly has such contempt for his works? One of them, Hayal (“Dream”), 2024, an A.I.-generated image on expired large-format Polaroid film, will appear in Christie’s upcoming Augmented Intelligence sale, which will also feature lots dating back to the 1960s. The auction has attracted a degree of negative attention, but there’s no denying its importance.
When Yavuz appears at a Meet-the-Artist event at the auction house as the sale kicks off on February 20, his bags will already be packed. The artist says he’s moving to Paris, his stay having been extended through the first days of the Trump administration while he attempts a final appeal.
Yavuz had taken to Instagram in recent weeks to sell off furniture and prints that filled the one-bedroom apartment he kept around the corner from the United Nations because, as the State Department has now repeatedly informed him, despite more than a decade spent producing transgressive art in the United States, having shown works around the world from Venice to Seoul to Palm Beach that challenge and celebrate the sexuality of Turkish men in a way that may not be welcome in his native Turkey, the U.S. government has determined there is nothing original or unique about Yavuz’s output, nothing to confer the Paris-born French-Turkish creative with the imprimatur of being an American artist.
It’s been fifteen years since Yavuz studied at Oberlin College and then earned his master’s degree from the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduation, he applied for an artist visa, which he renewed before applying for a talent-based green card. “I was told I was a textbook case,” Yavuz recalled. “But they ignored all the press, the exhibition histories–and so much of that criteria is worded in a way that allows the government to dismiss you for whatever reason. One criterion was that my work had to be original, and even if you don’t like the content of my work, you can’t deny that nobody else is doing this.”
A.I. found its way into Yavuz’s longtime photography practice at the tail end of the Covid pandemic in December 2021. “I often found myself daydreaming of scenes and scenarios that I would like to continue to shoot, and because I was stuck in the U.S. while waiting for my green card, I was lamenting that I couldn’t go and make new things in Turkey,” Yavuz said.
Midjourney helped to evolve the content within Yavuz’s images as he mastered navigating the political reality of the software. “I insisted on using Midjourney because it allowed me to talk about the limitations of a Western-based algorithm in depicting life in Turkey; there are insane mistakes both culturally and architecturally, like its inability to make a decent Turkish İznik tile even though it has access to billions of them. It fails to depict the Middle East as accurately as it should.”
Over time, Yavuz found, the software offered fewer, not more ways to express himself in an art historical context. “If I say show me two handsome Turkish men in a hammam looking at each other longingly, the software will warn me the result is too raunchy, so for a time, I would have to find ways to ask for that image in the context of other artists, like Robert Mapplethorpe, but now those requests are refused. For all I know, the most erotic images I could hope to create from the software are behind me now. It’s a shame that software developers, presumably a bunch of hetero white boys, have become arbiters of what makes sensual versus sexual art, but now the software will warn me that I’m trying to produce ‘adult work’ and threaten to revoke my membership.”
Of course, A.I. isn’t the focal point in Yavuz’s latest series—it’s the analog craftsmanship that led him to call upon and challenge Florian Kaps, the founder of Supersense. Yavuz had previously commissioned Supersense to print one of his images on large-format film, but at the time, Supersense had only conceived of a system to transfer digital images to film by capturing them from an iPad Mini screen, a process which led to visible pixelation. “So I asked, what if we did it with a transparency?”
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“I wanted to human-wash the works, to insist on a photographed reality for them, not because I wanted to trick people, but because I wanted to preserve the fantasy of storytelling, and before I knew it, I was on a Zoom call with the man who rescued Polaroid, and he loved the idea of transferring these images in this new way, but he warned there’s still a chemistry issue because the film expired thirty or forty years ago, and he invited me to come to Vienna.”
Just before he arrived, Yavuz learned about the TED A.I. conference that would be in town and emailed the organizers. Twelve minutes later, they responded and invited him to mount a show during the conference at the Volkstheater. The timing worked out, and Yavuz and Kaps were able to produce ten images in twelve hours.
“If I get lung cancer, it’ll be because of this,” Yavuz quipped. “That was real OG Polaroid chemistry on the last functioning large-format Polaroid camera on the planet. I hadn’t spent that much time in a chemical photo setting since my college days, which is crazy to me because this was the most digital project I’ve ever done in my life.”
And it’s because of Yavuz’s determination that Supersense now sells this same service to other visiting artists. Afterward, Yavuz recalled Kaps telling him, “You know what makes you an artist? You solve problems nobody has.”
The originality of his practice is still up for debate, however—at least as far as the U.S. is concerned. “The government wanted letters of reference, so I provided letters from incredible curators, and they made the point of saying why my work was unique and original. We received some concessions, but you have to score X number of points, and originality still eluded us. The only way I was able to travel to the residency, to Vienna and Istanbul was by appealing my denial, but now the odds of them conceding is astronomical. I have to get the fuck out of the country and get an artist visa to come back—it’s the most expensive process, and the fact that I have to jump through so many hoops to be a legal immigrant here after so many museum acquisitions and exhibitions when I’ve done everything right is bonkers to me.”
It doesn’t help his case that those who have the opportunity to profit from Yavuz’s work are more vocal about his importance than the fragile cultural institutions that hold his works in their permanent collections. “Sarp’s body of work is deeply personal and unmistakably infused with human agency,” Nicole Sales Giles, vice president of digital art sales at Christie’s, tells Observer. “His intricate process of converting his digital images into analog photography–a meticulous endeavor–exemplifies how some artists use A.I. as a tool to complement their practice rather than as a substitute for human creativity.”
Prior to the last presidential election, Alyssa Nitchun, executive director of the Leslie Lohman Museum in SoHo, wrote a letter in support of Yavuz’s green card application. The museum bills itself as “the only dedicated LGBTQIA+ art museum in the world with a mission to exhibit and preserve LGBTQIA+ art and foster the artists who create it” and has three of Yavuz’s Polaroid portraits in its permanent collection. However, when asked by Observer how the museum feels about the daunting political issues queer artists like Yavuz face in the current administration and whether the museum regards A.I. artwork as misunderstood or lacking originality, a representative for the museum replied via email that “they’re unable to provide any details or comment on the topics [Observer] mentioned.”
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