Işık Kaya & Thomas Georg Blank

A single shot from our video "Crude Aesthetics". For several months we have been out in Los Angeles and the surrounding area to film crude oil derricks working at night. The result is an approx. 15 minute long video loop that shows the city as a bizarre engine, the pacemaker of the passing age of petroleum. We will share more shots in the upcoming weeks. . .⁣ .⁣ .⁣ .⁣ .⁣ #refinery #petrol #crudeoil #crude #repetition #urbanism #socal #southland #southerncalifornia #movingimages #nonlinear #experimentalvideo #movingimage #artfilm #industrial #industry #blackgold #oilpump #losangeles #california #la #losangelesart #bigoil #artvideo #contemporaryart #contemporaryartist #videoart #videoartist #videoartwork #visualartist

This is another shot from Monuments, filmed at the intersection of I-8 and I-805 in San Diego. It is the only shot from the series that has this intense orange color. That's due to a big Dave & Buster's parking lot located right below the intersection. Just a few months after we recorded this, the street lights were changed to a much cooler color. . . . . . . #repetition #urbanism #socal #southland #southerncalifornia #movingimages #nonlinear #experimentalvideo #california #la #highways #losangelesart #carculture #artvideo #contemporaryart #videoart #visualart #outofservicemag #urbanautica #mustardmood #manalteredlandscape #banalmag #noicemag #fivesixmag #woofermagazine

Many things in our world appear so normal to us, or are so ubiquitous, that they disappear from our perception. Containers are among those things. This form of commodity transport has been in existence only since the 1950s. The intermodal shipping container was developed by American businessmen Malcolm Purcell McLean. They can be used across different modes of transport – from ship to rail to truck – without unloading and reloading their cargo. These oversized, hyper-standardized metal boxes are the perfect hardware for a neoliberally organized globe. . . . . . . #nightscape #labor #247 #supplychain #container #consumerism #southland #southerncalifornia #contemporaryart #portoflosangeles #portofla #portoflongbeach #bigboats #videoart #contemporaryvideoart #outofservicemag #urbanautica #mustardmood #manalteredlandscape #banalmag #noicemag #fivesixmag #worbz #woofermagazine

"Infrascapes" Artist: Kaya & Blank @kaya.blank Curated by: Lukas Picard @_lukaspicard 📍basis e.V., Gutleutstrasse 8-12, 60329 Frankfurt am Main, Germany @basisfrankfurt 12.02-10.05.2026 Read the complete text on lowgroundpressure.blog web platform (🔗 in stories). 📸 courtesy the artist and the gallery; #contemporaryart #artisttoday #lowgroundpressure #arttoday #artist

It’s a wrap! Our exhibition Infrascapes at basis in Frankfurt is officially over and the gallery spaces are already empty. We can’t express enough how grateful we are to everyone involved in making this happen. This was our first comprehensive solo show and having an institution trust us with this much space still feels unreal - we might be repeating ourselves, but thanks x3000 to @_lukaspicard for starting this journey and seeing it through with us. Being able to see everything we have worked on in the last seven years in one exhibition was a transformative experience on many levels for us. We are also grateful for the enormous amount of encounters with old and new friends that we had during the run of the show. For all the people that were not able to see Infrascapes in person, we created a walkthrough video. You can find the link to it in our bio. If you want to receive a PDF of the folder with essays and project description, just send us a DM with an email address and we will send that over right away. We leave Frankfurt with a lot of good energy and are excited to get back into the studio. More soon!

#EarthlyFabulations is a special online exhibition running on our platform until 20 May. Featuring the work of twelve lens-based artists from across the globe, this digital circuit brings together speculative, ecocritical, and fabulative practices that challenge extractive ways of seeing and reimagine our relationship to the more-than-human world. 1. Sara Aliaga Ticona - From the series “The life of water, presence and absence”, La Paz, Bolivia 2. Sarah Spitzer - “Untitled (witnesses and actors)”, Mänttä, Finland 3. Kaya & Blank’s - “Bloom Installation (Exposure unit detail)”, Germany Sara Aliaga Ticona (@sarawayraphoto ) is a Bolivian photojournalist and Aymara visual artist based in La Paz. Her work addresses gender, identity, human rights, and the climate crisis, focusing on its impact on Indigenous communities. Through symbolic and documentary photography, she builds an ethical visual memory that reflects her lived experience as a woman and photographer. Sarah Spitzer (@_sarah_spitzer ) is a Germany-based visual artist working with photography. Her practice explores memory, preservation, and human relationships, especially our connection to nature. She is interested in how identities and human images are constructed through storytelling that blends fact and fiction. Kaya & Blank (@kaya.blank ) explore how humans shape and inhabit the world, with a focus on the impact of neoliberal politics on everyday life. Their work traces economic infrastructures to examine built environments and how human dominance over nature is reflected in architecture. ✨“Earthly Fabulations” draws from ecocritical and speculative practices to bridge archive and imagination, surfacing voices, memories, and relations historically erased by colonial and human-centered narratives. Across post-industrial landscapes, Indigenous territories, atmospheric infrastructures, and disappearing waterscapes, the featured artists rethink photography as a space for ecological kinship, coexistence, and collective responsibility. 🔗 Visit the link in our bio to explore the exhibition on dergreif.org.

What we enjoyed a lot in the exchange with Deb Chachra on this exhibition was how much fascination she has for the infrastructures of this world as achievements of engineering and science while being acutely aware of the many social and ecological issues that are embedded in their existence as manifestations of unjust power structures. She was able to precisely describe our work, not just thematically, but formally. This quote from her essay captures the logic of the show better than we could have articulated it ourselves: the macro and the micro held together, the monumental and the chemical trace in the same room, fascination, wonder, critique and concern simultaneously present. The image below the quote is an installation view from Crude Aesthetics. The video projection, a close-up of an oil pump moving in its slow, relentless rhythm, is cast onto a semi-transparent screen, and the after-image spills across the floor toward the viewer, pulling them into the frame. Along the wall, the heliographs sit on shelves with built in lights that give the space something of the quality of a shrine. The bitumen in those prints came from the same ground the pumps are extracting, the La Brea Tar Pits, a few miles from the oil fields we filmed. Deb’s distinction between the macro and the micro is right there in the room: the scale of the industrial system on screen, and its material trace in a photographic object. Last day tomorrow. Open today from 12 - 6pm @basisfrankfurt · #Infrascapes #infrastructures #basisfrankfurt #contemporaryart #contemporaryphotography

One of the things we didn’t anticipate when making Infrascapes was how much the conversations with our writers would shape the language we now use to describe our own process. Lukas Picard’s phrase “relational approximation” is one we keep coming back to, especially in relation to Bloom. It captures something we had been trying to articulate before, that these images are not made so much as negotiated, with a living organism, with light, with time. The image below the quote is a detail of one of the algae prints from Bloom. The process took years to develop. A modified projector casts an image onto a tray of freshwater algae — Chlorella vulgaris — and over the course of several days the organisms respond to the light, growing into the shape of the projected image. What you see in the print is the result of that growth: the intense green of living algae, and at the same time an image that is soft and grainy. We will share some more images from this new series soon. Last weekend of Infrascapes @basisfrankfurt · #Infrascapes #contemporaryphotography #basisfrankfurt #infrstructure #contemporaryart

What struck us most about Siobhan Angus’ writing is how little it wastes. Each sentence carries a complete thought, stated plainly and without hedging. That kind of clarity is a form of rigour, and it pushes us to be equally direct about what we are actually claiming in our work. Her argument that photography is not a transparent window but a participant in the flows of energy, labor and resources that shape contemporary life resonates strongly with us. The image below the quote is a still from the video component of Intermodal, filmed at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. The scene is familiar to anyone who has driven the 710 freeway south toward the water: towers of containers, cranes moving through the night, the machinery of global trade running without pause. What we realized only later is that the colors dominating the frame, the blues, reds and whites of the containers and cranes, are incidentally the colors of the American flag. Siobhan’s essay makes exactly this connection: that the infrastructure of consumption and the idea of national identity are not separate things. Closing week! Last days to see our show @basisfrankfurt · #Infrascapes #Infrastructure #Frankfurt #contemporaryart #contemporaryphotography

Lukas Picard is the third author for the folder accompanying Infrascapes. He is not only a close friend and brilliant mind, but also the curator of this exhibition. None of this would have happened without him and we are grateful beyond words for that. In his essay he writes about time, about how modernity encoded a particular idea of the future into its infrastructure, and how that future is now hard to believe in, given the clear signs of climate change and environmental collapse that are all around us. It gave us a new way to think about why the nocturnal framing in our work feels so important: night removes the promise of the next horizon. The image below the quote is a still from Monuments, a series that grew out of one of the most ordinary experiences of living in Southern California: driving. The concrete overpasses and interchange structures of the Interstate Highway System dominate the California landscape so completely that they have become almost invisible, part of the background of daily life. Photographed at night and stripped of traffic, they appear for what they are: enormous, unintended monuments to a particular economic logic, built for speed and expansion at any cost. Just a few more days before the exhibition closes. @_lukaspicard #Infrascapes #Infrastructure #basisfrankfurt #contemporaryart #contemporaryphotography

Deb Chachra writes about infrastructure the way very few people can, with scientific precision and genuine wonder - you should read her amazing book „How Infrastructure Works“. This passage here from her essay „Network Traces“ in the Infrascapes folder stopped us when we first read it. She moves from the planetary scale of global material flows all the way down to the molecular, to what those flows leave behind in the body. The image below the quote shows the detail of a large multi panel salted paper print from the project Intermodal. These prints are made using salt water we collected in the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, water that carries massive amounts of the material traces that Deb refers to in her text. The image itself was taken from a pier in Seal Beach. While the people in the foreground enjoy a late summer sunset, the background is dotted with cranes, bridges and container ships. Infrascapes closes this Sunday. @debcha · @basisfrankfurt #Infrascapes #infrastructures #basisfrankfurt #contemporaryphotography #contemporaryart

One of the most rewarding things of working on our current show Infrascapes was the conversations that grew around it, with writers and thinkers who helped us see our own work differently and develop language for an audience to go beyond what they can experience in our installations. In the next few days we will share short quotes from texts that Siobhan Angus, Deb Chachra and Lukas Picard wrote for the folder accompanying the exhibition. Today’s quote is from Siobhan’s text „Infrastructures of Seeing“. Her research on the material history of photography gave us a language for something we had been working toward intuitively: that the photograph is never innocent of the world it depicts. It is made from that world. We highly recommend reading her book Camera Geologica. The image below the quote shows a detail of a heliograph from Crude Aesthetics. Bitumen is mixed with lavender oil before the mixture is applied to a mirror polished sheet of aluminum. It is the same recipe that Nicéphore Niépce used to capture his View from the Window at Le Gras. Our image shows the original In-n-Out, one of the first drive through restaurants and corner stones of California car culture. Last week to see the show @basisfrankfurt Gutleutstraße 8–12, Frankfurt. Open Tue–Fri 15–19h (Thu until 21h), Sat–Sun 12–18h. #Infrascapes #infrastructure #basisfrankfurt #contemporaryart #contemporaryphotography