Ascendy (Ümüt Yildiz)
Video, 2023
About the artwork
"Cripples" is a deeply personal project, blending the repulsive with the beautiful, the bizarre with humor, all wrapped in a flawless aesthetic. Each figure reflects a unique facet of human behavior—whether it’s noble or flawed, tender or harsh.
Receiving love from friends and family during a challenging time of life inspired these characters, with their odd and quirky forms, to represent the two artists' journey through emotional turbulence. Despite their strange appearances, they exude a humorous charm, capturing the complexity of human nature and turning Cripples into a vivid portrayal of the human experience.
Encountering a Cripple may encourage reactions from curiosity and intrigue to introspective reflection. The contrast of grotesque and graceful elements invites a deeper contemplation of human imperfection, while the playful charm evokes lightness and empathy. The figures' strange beauty challenges the viewer to explore the contradictions between what we find repulsive and what we embrace as human.
Audio explanation
Listen to Ümüt Yildiz discuss this work.
Ümüt Yildiz is a lecturer of Creative Coding in Design at Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences and lives in Cologne and Berlin, where he has been exploring artificial intelligence since 2018. Outside of his teaching, he often collaborates with artists such as Cro, and Bilderbuch and brands such as Bulgari, Tods, and Vogue Italia, testing the limits of current technologies.
He participated as an exhibitor in the NFT Pavilion 2022 Venice Biennale. His work is characterized by themes of humanism and controversy through the use of original production. The intervention of artificial intelligence in the visual material of original production allows an interpretation of reality free from the mechanisms of rationalist self-determination of man, introducing the concept of "memory" of the machine, which does not preserve any experience paradigms or culture inherent in human nature. Visual works are created that catalyze the world of the irrational and the unconscious, where the need to create order is less, leaving room for a more intuitive and ancient vision of the subject.