Altay Tuz

Members Only

Rituals are important components of culture, tradition, everyday life and art that are worth discovering. Altay Tuz's project "Members Only" explores the question of integration and identity in Turkish cultural clubs and cafés in Hamburg and Berlin. His images of these spaces are full of information, details and signs. They are composed calmly and precisely, in fact as he is himself. Altay Tuz uses his camera to gain access to places that have become a "dream home" for many people from Turkey through their furnishings and use. An omnipresent longing for one's own missed culture becomes visible and combines with existence in German reality. For many Turkish families, who are now living here in the second and third generation, these places are like parallel worlds that are only accessible to them and welcome them. Altay Tuz's photographs document these places as space and time determined by wanderlust and make visible the symbiosis of tradition and the present.