No Man's Land - The Time Dwellers
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 years with the aim of mapping individual and collective subconscious space.
Conceived as a conceptual apparatus to investigate the mechanisms of the human psyche that enable one to either participate in reality or 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 (southern Israel), consisting of three 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, as well as supports and surfaces.
The architectural structure of the room serves as a container for repressed or unspoken emotions, while the works within it activate and transform life material that exists in the collective subconscious, beyond language and time. These works explore the invasion of the surface by suppressed subconscious material, inquiring into the unsettling relationship between unspoken, unseen subconscious life materials and how these layers of information activate and shape the visible surface of the psyche. 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 continues her years-long, process-based project that builds complex correspondences between the human psyche, human-made architecture, and natural sites. In dialogue with her site-specific installations exhibited in various spaces, contexts, and settings across Europe over the years, the installation presented at Arter offers visitors a new interpretation of Liquid Desert’s architectural structure and its broader cultural context.
Arter Museum, Istanbul, Turkey
