Faruk Ulay

Writings, Visual Literature, Bookworks

This Space for Correspondence

| 82 pages | 8″ x 5″ (20.5cm x 12.5cm) | Ravenna Press | 2021 |
An anthology of vintage postcards and imagined messages. Collection of texts, poetry, doodles, drawings, dreams, jokes, confessions, reports, and speculations by twenty two writers/artists including Faruk Ulay

Distances | Instances

| 12 Panels | 8.25” x 10.25” (20.5 cm x 26 cm) | 2020 |
Portfolio of twelve photographs with texts.
Life on sidewalks of a city invaded by sunshine. Washed out surfaces, useless shadows, lost horizons.

The Lands Between

| 80 Pages | 5” x 8” (12.5cm x 20.5cm) | Ravenna Press | 2018 |
Thirty three stations of pioneering hope, false victories, betrayals, ruination, and attempts at recovery. Pockets of unreal history, particles of irreal thought. Meanwhile two souls, a keen guru and his mute apprentice, skirt the edge of these chimeric lands, and observe the chasm of chaos.

Dolls Found, Words Lost

The book was created in conjunction with an exhibition. Sixteen found objects–discarded dolls, all mass-produced in 1950s–were photographed on a stage constructed by the artist. Facing pages accommodate short paragraphs of text, each loosely tethered to a restless background. This project plays with lost and reclaimed identity, queries authenticity, toys with the artist’s intervention/intention to inject uniqueness into mass-produced objects, and calls into question the systems of presentation and representation.

Cultivation of Enigma

| 80 Pages | 7″ x 7″ (18cm x 18cm) | Full Color | 2011 | Edition of 125 copies |
A portfolio in a book format, comprising thirty-six photographs and an accompanying text. The prevailing sentiment here is silence, broken with simple questions and worries about history being erased aggressively and future is being built on the ghost of a past. Cultural geography is visualized through mute photographs of disappearing urban architecture; silence and muteness are treated like covert protestations, and simple observations of decay are transformed into a fount eternal truths.

Beneath the Shadow of Perpetual Defeat - A Graphic Design Manifesto

| 404 Pages | 6.25″ x 9.5″ (15.5cm x 24cm) | Full Color | Akin Nalca Publishing | 2005 |
Subtitled as a Graphic Design Manifesto, the book features french folded pages that shelter ninety-nine short paragraphs. Front sides of the pages are reserved for unbreachable walls. The writing is sarcastic and defeatist. While pretending to be a manifesto, it pokes fun at commercial design striving to please the corporate culture and proposes illusory, impractical, and ultimately utopian solutions.

Terra Infirma

| 68 Pages | 5″ x 8″ (12.5cm x 20.5cm) | Triple Press | 2005 |
Ninety nine disjointed paragraphs, absurd propositions, false syllogisms or very short, dense, irreal stories. An experiment to define a universe of radical disjunction.