Annette Merrild: The Room Project

In the exhibition "The Room Project", Istanbul Modern Photography Gallery presented photographs taken in nine cities in nine countries by Annette Merrild, who says her aim is to show the differences and similarities among national cultures.

Rooted in the feelings of alienation that she experienced while a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg, the four-year undertaking got started with photographs that Merrild took in the living rooms of neighbors living in the same buildings as she did first in Hamburg and then in New York and Copenhagen. Inspired by people’s reactions to the images that she’d captured, she created "The Room Project" as a result. Over the next two years, she visited Warsaw, Barcelona, Tallinn, Lyon, Manchester, and Istanbul.

In her project, which Annette Merrild defined as an "anthropological voyage from one end of Europe to the other", she captured images –social portraits– of the interiors of people’s homes by using her camera. Like still-lifes, the artist shows us the artifacts of human existence –in this case, fixtures and furnishings– but not the people themselves.

The exhibition consisted of 118 photographs by Annete Merild, who adopted the word "If you want to get to know the world, you need to start with your neighbor", and turned her lens on stereotypes about people in our own and other countries that have become engraved in most of our minds.

Curator: Engin Özendes