Through his project Thin Air, Cemil Batur Gökçeer draws up a sensory archive of disaster, whether photographing afflicted architectures, natural catastrophes or loved ones in moments of turmoil. In contrast to the generic word disaster which distances us from the singularity of the felt situation, he tackles this notion from an internal point of view by confronting it with experience. The artist volunteered and removed himself to places that suffered natural catastrophes. Often atmospheric, the shots he realized in this context are not searching to document the event but to conjure up a sense of transcendence–mist, a fault or hollowness in the rock being recurring motifs.

At this point, he decided to allow chance and aleatory methods to intervene in his working process. He introduced the rise of a new path to face the unspeakable: photographs are randomly realized with triple exposures, every roll being re-exposed twice. An image of doubt emerges where different elements superimpose, and it becomes more complex to decipher.
The artist compares this process to the ritual of coffee ground reading to which he is familiar, in other words to a form of interaction which opens a new breach in the way of reading and interpreting essential issues. This experimental act becomes a transformative, healing process. The thin airstream from the title is the sign of a breath of life that cannot be smothered.