Deniz Uster
  • Deniz Uster
  • work
    • lens-based >
      • Homo-Scylla
      • The Polity of Φ promotional video
      • Beyond is Before
      • 69
      • Being an Ear Guest to a Gossip
      • Prelude
    • space-based >
      • The South, The Ore and Them
      • The Poetics of Egress
      • The Woeful Fable of the Gangue
      • Domes of TERRA NULLIUS
      • The Anatomy of Floating
      • Dust and Entanglements Beneath the Skin
      • Citadel (Bricolages)
      • Citadel
      • The Polity of Φ: The Consulate
      • The Polity of Φ: The Call
      • Beyond is Before installation
      • The Spine That Binds Us Together
      • Folly for the Short-Lived
      • Türgen Culture and Heritage
      • Somewhere in the Middle of Two, Southwest of One and North of The Other
      • Looking For a Needle in a Hay-Barn With No Eyes and No Hands
      • Invited and Volunteered
      • In the Memory of Four
      • Finger to a Blind Eye
      • Hide the Straw, Wait for its Time
      • Egg Washing Machine
      • A Machine or an Ifrit
      • Said and Put
    • paper-based >
      • T E R R A - N U L L I U S: Harvesting Gravity
      • Zones of Protention
  • info
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    • cv
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Dust and Entanglements Beneath the Skin

‘Dust and Entanglements Beneath the Skin’ (2023) is the enmeshment of three socially-engaged projects I collaboratively produced in Ireland, South Korea and UAE, titled ‘The Spine That Binds Us Together’ (2014), ‘Turgen Culture and Heritage’ (2013) and ‘Beyond is Before’ (2013). This ‘parent’ installation forms part of Time is Love exhibition at the Kethuda Husrev Hammam, curated by Aysegul Sonmez.

The manuscript displayed within the glass-cased shipping crate is ‘The Spine That Binds Us Together’. This atlas, whose contents you can view digitally on a tablet, is a series of individual stories, each told by someone with a relation to the sea - whether dock worker, sailor or explorer, whose personal accounts are presented as illustrative coastlines. These pages depict the understated significance of individual marks on history, utilising the primal methodology of place described through oral narration, thus disregarding the canonical stature of official maps as established institutions. 

As the beach sand fuses into construction sand, the cartographic accounts of my manuscript articulates itself to the hand-drawn maps of Istanbul and Seoul’s overlapping city walls. Featured in this middle section is Türgen Culture and Heritage, a makeshift museum for a fictitious community previously hosted within my studio at Seoul Art Space Geumcheon. A documentary video (achieved through fictional interviews with the labourers of the art space), displays of national flags, historical artefacts, and hand-drawn maps demonstrated the culture and migration trails of the community during a 400-year period.

At the third section of my installation the construction sand cleaves to the desert sand; where the references of displacement and manual labour of the neighbouring projects consolidate into a body of multiple renditions. Partially buried here is Beyond is Before: the story of a sole survivor traveling with his pet kitten, envisioned in a post-apocalyptic future. Under the span of a pylon a wooden chest is discovered, capable of regressing any object placed within into its raw material, evoking a factory processing contrariwise. This process takes its inspiration from the film’s location of Nad Al Sheba, an area which used to be crowded with settlements, camel markets and traders, which then observed a forced urban displacement. To this extent the chest is itself returning back into a tree with an underground root system and sprouting branches. Under a layer of grass and wealthy soil, a camel-bone rosary slowly transforms back into the camel, alloys separate into their component parts, cotton products into the fibre, plastics into crude oil.

This project was made possible with the financial support of Horoz Logistics, Turkish Cultural Foundation, SAHA, Sirius Art Centre, Glasgow Life, Arts Trust Scotland, Seoul Art Space Geumcheon and Farook Foundation. 
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