The Woeful Fable of the Gangue
Once upon a time, in 15th century when parts of the Earth and Oceans remained uncharted, bizarre sea monsters were drawn on maps to indicate danger of the unknown, so that seafarers would stay away from those regions. Fiction was projected onto the unknown, defined in maps as a spatial zone, or in fables as a temporal zone (the future). Nowadays, that space of projection would be outer space, but alongside blockbuster anthropomorphic alien depictions or romantic landscape projections, we are filling it up with private property and junk through DHL sponsored payloads. That leaves us with the future, which, in turn, seems overwhelmed by catastrophe models and financial risk calculations to monetize time and volatility. Imagining Deniz Uster’s Terra Nullius, I am left with dead organic bodies, sometimes the shape of an animal is discernible, at others it is putrefying organic matter upon which power stations and coal mines rise, tiny humans labor in and labor out, underground pipelines and energy producing reactors appear more alive than all of those bodies. Maybe the surface of projections for all of our desires and horrors is now located not in the future, but in our past. Colonialism consolidated as the fiction of eternal growth while time is always, in truth, limited: “such a compulsive suicidal gesture itself becoming some sort of immortal automatism by the undead”. Maybe we are already at the other side of extinction, counting faster and faster to escape from a future past, one thousand and one nights of delirium in frantic excess.
Excerpt from the exhibition text by Asli Seven
Excerpt from the exhibition text by Asli Seven
The Woeful Fable of the Gangue, 2023, 40x30x30 (diorama only). glass dome, wool, coal, silk, aluminium, modelling materials, mahagony, balsa, birch seeds