No-Man's Land - The Time Dwellers
Produced in the context of the exhibition Locus Solus, No Man’s Land is a site-specific, room-scale installation that articulates existing works of various media by Sasportas, thus materializing a junction between image, sound, sculpture and architecture.
The installation is an integral part of the Liquid Desert project that the artist has been elaborating on over the past 7 (10) years with the aim of mapping individual and collective subconscious space. Conceived as a conceptual apparatus for investigating the mechanisms of the human psyche that enable one to participate in reality or to forget, reject, and deny it, the Liquid Desert project brings to the surface a negative subterranean site – a bunker virtually situated in the Negev Desert (in southern Israel), consisting in total of 3 underground levels and 49 rooms.
Featuring Room No. 10, the installation presented at Arter is structured by two black walls that function as dividers and thresholds, supports and surfaces. The architectural structure of the room serves as a container for repressed/non-verbalized emotions, while the works that take place in it activate/transform an unspoken life material that exists in the collective subconscious outside of language and time. These works explore the invasion of the surface by suppressed subconscious material, and in doing so, inquire into the unsettling correspondence between unspoken, unseen subconscious life materials (להוריד אולי כי יש חזרתיות), and the ways in which these layers of information activate and establish the psyche’s visible surface. They enable the act of witnessing by communicating materials of tension, contradiction, conflict and crisis: materials that charge the system energetically but cannot be verbally expressed.
With No-Man’s Land, Sasportas pursues her years-long, process-based project, building complex correspondences between the human psyche, human-made architecture and natural sites. Conversing with her site-specific installations that have been exhibited during the past years in various spaces, contexts and settings across Europe, the installation presented at Arter provides visitors with a new reading of Liquid Desert’s architectural structure and its wider cultural context.
Locus Solus, Exhibition views, 2022
Arter museum
Arter, which was opened in 2010 as an affiliated institution of the Vehbi Koç Foundation, moved to its new building in Dolapdere in 2019 when the foundation celebrated its 50th anniversary. Arter's new building, bearing the signature of the British architectural office Grimshaw Architects, has taken its place among the important cultural structures of the city.
The building, which offers its visitors different spatial and artistic experiences without breaking their connection with the city, was planned as a dynamic “series of spaces” to have a pleasant time.
The Arter Collection comprises more than 1,400 works by around 400 artists as of 2022 and brings together various contemporary expressions, positions and practices from all around the world. The collection includes works from the 1960s to the present, covering a broad variety of media ranging from painting, drawing, sculpture, print, photography, film, video, installation to sound, light and performance-based practices.