Cihad Caner

The “others” of this story are monsters. Their frequented places are those that the maps do not show, the ships are not moored, and the compasses are surprised. It’s a landless country. Where the world ends. Rumor has it that wild things live in a remote realm. These “other” figures are the inhabitants of the border region where the mind is weakened and fantasies flourish.

The monsters provoke us to break down our built-in categories and rethink. They threaten the known with unknown and leave us with fear and trembling. They are driven to hell or heaven, or they are driven out of the human community and sent to the land of foreigners. The body of the monster is a political claim

on its own. With its existence, it destroys all the assumptions that are fundamental to human beings and social stratification. The monster does not know paradise; it is not made of clay, so it cannot dream of returning to the dust.

The project focuses on the image of the “other” as monster that finds itself in the mechanisms of dominant image production with very specific images. The artist created fiction-animated avatars inspired from various monster illustrations in ancients manuscripts, Acaibu’l-Mahlukat and Garaibu’l-Mevcudat by Zekeriya ibn Muhammed Qazwini, Siah-Qalem’s drawings and Japanese yokais (monsters and supernatural characters) Gazu Hyakki Yagyō written by Sekien Toriyama.

Cihad Caner (1990) is an artist living and working in Rotterdam and Istanbul who works primarily with photography, video, CGI and sculpture. In 2016, Caner graduated with a master’s in Media Design and Communication from the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam.