Burtynsky's Altered Earth Lands at Perili Köşk

Edward Burtynsky has spent four decades photographing quarries, mines, industrial zones and farmland from above. Altered Earth, curated by Marcus Schubert, is his first major exhibition in Turkey and occupies the floors of Perili Köşk at Borusan Contemporary. It includes the erosion project he carried out in Turkey, which anchors a global body of work in local soil. Seen from height, a mine becomes pattern and a farming basin becomes colour field, and the pictures grow more beautiful as their subject grows heavier.

That tension is the exhibition's engine rather than its problem, and Burtynsky leaves it unresolved. In a country where mining permits, watersheds and agricultural land are contested in public, the work reads less as warning than as a question of scale: it shows the size of damage that no single news photograph can frame. The show opened on 20 September 2025 and closes on 16 August 2026. Check the museum's opening days before travelling to Rumelihisarı, and look at the prints twice, once from across the room and once close enough to read the surface.