Ekin Çekiç (b. 1996, Istanbul) is a photographer based in Istanbul whose practice examines the intersections of landscape, memory, and political ecology. He received both his BA and MA in Photography from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, where his research focused on photography as a critical tool for investigating environmental transformation, displacement, and the relationship between humans and the territories they inhabit.
What interests him about photography is not simply its capacity to record what is visible, but its ability to draw attention to what has become invisible. His work focuses on landscapes in transition, territories reshaped through human intervention, and the traces these processes leave on everyday life. While engaging with subjects such as urbanization, infrastructure projects, resource extraction, and ecological crises, he approaches them not merely as environmental or political issues, but as experiences shaped by memory, belonging, and loss. Rather than using photography to explain the world, he sees it as a way of exposing the fractures embedded within it.
Long-term research forms the foundation of his practice. Instead of approaching places as a temporary visitor, he spends extended periods within them, returning repeatedly to observe transformation as an ongoing process rather than a completed event. Dams, abandoned mining sites, newly constructed settlements, and changing public spaces become points through which broader questions of power, labor, ecology, and collective memory emerge.
Rather than seeking definitive answers, Çekiç is interested in uncertainty, absence, and the limits of representation. His projects often revolve around places that have disappeared, become inaccessible, or resist fixed definitions. In a time when landscapes are increasingly reshaped by engineering, technology, and capital, he understands photography not only as a means of witnessing these transformations but also as a critical space for questioning the realities they produce.
His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and festivals including Elgiz Museum, Contemporary Istanbul, MAMUT Art Project, 212 Photography Festival, Bursa International Photography Festival, Kıraathane, Mixer Gallery, and exhibitions in Munich and Armenia. He is the recipient of the First Prize at the 212 Photography Festival (2019) and the New Searches Award (2017), and received the CultureCivic Art Production Grant in 2024 for his long-term project A Manual for Making a Lake.
He is an affiliate of PLATFORM by GAPO