• A MOMENT OPEN •

Young men move through spaces that feel at once intimate and exposed. Their closeness is intentional, shaped by recognition, desire, and the quiet excitement of discovering themselves in one another. These encounters carry a sense of immediacy, as if something has only just been acknowledged and cannot be taken back.

This work is rooted in my personal memory, shaped between Moscow and Istanbul in the years following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. I return to a brief period when both environments allowed for moments of openness, where a generation could experience itself with fewer constraints, even if only temporarily. That freedom was never secure. It existed with the constant awareness that it could disappear.

I do not document these moments. I reconstruct them. Drawing from lived experience, observation, and emotional residue, I build images that hold onto fragments of that time: fleeting freedoms, unguarded gestures, and the intensity of being briefly unafraid. Desire appears direct and shared, yet remains fragile, suspended between presence and risk.

Masculinity here is not fixed. I approach it as something learned, performed, and quietly negotiated through contradiction, through tenderness and control, visibility and silence, freedom and fear. The images do not resolve these tensions. They remain within them, allowing something fragile to exist, however briefly.