The South, The Ore and Them
"Taking up such normalized fictions as points of departure, Deniz Uster’s worlding can be read as attempt to uncover the fantasmagorical foundations of the infrastructures that sustain our present in a normalized global context, and to recover fictioning as a tool to speculate on alternative pasts and futures, with a specific focus on the dawning space age and the legacies of cold war space race.
“The South, The Ore and Them”, a miniature sculpture sealed inside a glass case, itself articulated across two pentagon-shaped faces of a dodecahedron shape offers an entry point to the kaleidoscopic compositions of Deniz Uster, across microscopic and macrocosmic scales and narratives at hand. There is no beginning nor end, as is the case for every sculptural scene in the exhibition, but multiple circular and systemic strands of material, causality and meaning that coexist. For the purposes of this piece of writing which has to stick to linearity, we can begin with the miniature world trapped inside the glass box: the scale model of an Astrobotic Peregrine Lander stands on what could be, based on the red pigment, a depiction of the Martian surface. Another political fiction is activated here through the presence of the International Flag of Planet Earth – organizing an inside, in order to capture an outside. Groups of miniature workers in uniform inhabit the landscape, engaged in mining, extracting, loading and unloading minerals, rocks, soil, dust. This could be a scene from a soil production factory for space agriculture, or it could be an experiment for using lab-generated land moss to turn Mars green. Together with the distance introduced by the glass dome enclosing this scene, a strange feeling of anachronism occurs: the most cutting edge, privately funded commercial space technologies coexist with century-old forms of labor and construction; we are actually landing on the moon and on mars and probing the solar system for water and other minerals, and yet our wildest dream harks back to the romantic idea of a lush, green, proliferating nature. Deniz Uster has carried out for years this multidirectional research across the latest developments in astrobiology, speculative physics and 21st century deep space missions, and yet, the apparatus she chooses to display her diorama-like sculptural scenes and pastiche-like compositions all originate in the 19th century.
Scaling back to the large shape of the dodecahedron, the encapsulated scene suddenly appears connected to a small porthole close to the ground, where a miniature ladder disappears into the geometrical shape. Suddenly the lunar lander, the workers and the mining activity all become dependent on some causality situated elsewhere. I am reminded of Platonic solids, recent astrophysics calculations used to model the shape of the Universe, and Roger Caillois’ idea of finitude. Dodecahedra do not occur in nature, they are constructs of the human mind as it encounters nature (or reality), but just as Poincaré famously arrived at complex three dimensional models for the shape of the universe based on the dodecahedron shape, the amplituhedron, which is the basis of the most recent cosmological models is still a polyhedron, the only difference being its quantum multi-dimensionality. Through all these complex geometric forms and computer generated models engaged in speculative calculations over the shape of the universe, one constant remains, which is their finitude. In Roger Caillois’s thinking, if there is magic in the world, it is not because of infinite possibilities or infinite growth, but because of this inescapable theoretical finitude. "
Excerpt from the exhibition text by Asli Seven
“The South, The Ore and Them”, a miniature sculpture sealed inside a glass case, itself articulated across two pentagon-shaped faces of a dodecahedron shape offers an entry point to the kaleidoscopic compositions of Deniz Uster, across microscopic and macrocosmic scales and narratives at hand. There is no beginning nor end, as is the case for every sculptural scene in the exhibition, but multiple circular and systemic strands of material, causality and meaning that coexist. For the purposes of this piece of writing which has to stick to linearity, we can begin with the miniature world trapped inside the glass box: the scale model of an Astrobotic Peregrine Lander stands on what could be, based on the red pigment, a depiction of the Martian surface. Another political fiction is activated here through the presence of the International Flag of Planet Earth – organizing an inside, in order to capture an outside. Groups of miniature workers in uniform inhabit the landscape, engaged in mining, extracting, loading and unloading minerals, rocks, soil, dust. This could be a scene from a soil production factory for space agriculture, or it could be an experiment for using lab-generated land moss to turn Mars green. Together with the distance introduced by the glass dome enclosing this scene, a strange feeling of anachronism occurs: the most cutting edge, privately funded commercial space technologies coexist with century-old forms of labor and construction; we are actually landing on the moon and on mars and probing the solar system for water and other minerals, and yet our wildest dream harks back to the romantic idea of a lush, green, proliferating nature. Deniz Uster has carried out for years this multidirectional research across the latest developments in astrobiology, speculative physics and 21st century deep space missions, and yet, the apparatus she chooses to display her diorama-like sculptural scenes and pastiche-like compositions all originate in the 19th century.
Scaling back to the large shape of the dodecahedron, the encapsulated scene suddenly appears connected to a small porthole close to the ground, where a miniature ladder disappears into the geometrical shape. Suddenly the lunar lander, the workers and the mining activity all become dependent on some causality situated elsewhere. I am reminded of Platonic solids, recent astrophysics calculations used to model the shape of the Universe, and Roger Caillois’ idea of finitude. Dodecahedra do not occur in nature, they are constructs of the human mind as it encounters nature (or reality), but just as Poincaré famously arrived at complex three dimensional models for the shape of the universe based on the dodecahedron shape, the amplituhedron, which is the basis of the most recent cosmological models is still a polyhedron, the only difference being its quantum multi-dimensionality. Through all these complex geometric forms and computer generated models engaged in speculative calculations over the shape of the universe, one constant remains, which is their finitude. In Roger Caillois’s thinking, if there is magic in the world, it is not because of infinite possibilities or infinite growth, but because of this inescapable theoretical finitude. "
Excerpt from the exhibition text by Asli Seven
The South, The Ore and Them (installation) 2024. 355x220x120cm, brass, aluminium, glass, earth, glycerin. TERRA NULLIUS: Harvesting Gravity at .artSümer Gallery
The South, The Ore and Them (diorama) 2023. 50x30x30cm, brass. silk, stainless steel, modelling materials, mahagony wood, glass dome.
This exhibition is kindly supported by Asas Sanat.
The South, The Ore and Them (diorama) 2023. 50x30x30cm, brass. silk, stainless steel, modelling materials, mahagony wood, glass dome.
This exhibition is kindly supported by Asas Sanat.
Photo credit no:1 and no:3: Nazli Erdemirel