SANATORIUM presents Gülşah Mursaloğlu’s solo exhibition Downtime, Spread Too Thin between 27 December 2024-22 February 2025. The exhibition investigates the conditions that enable life; productivity, slowing down, and downtime—when machines and humans stop working and take a break. Eggs, their shells, and sleep waves are the main agents of this investigation.
The video installation A Chanting Egg, Near the Dent placed at the center of the exhibition, contemplates the circumstances that initiate and sustain life: hosting, slowness, dormancy, nurturing, disruption, unrest, and transformation. As the performer gently interacts with eggs scattered across a storage corridor, they go through transformation at various speeds within an abstract landscape. While the camera closely follows the performer, two simultaneous choreographies unfold: the eggs follow the contours of the space, are digested, placed on receptacles, and caressed; their shells are broken, crushed, and tumbled in infinite loops.
The sculptural installation An Accelerated, Million-Year-Long Encounter of Sorts features the eggshells the artist has collected from her kitchen and close community over the course of a year and a half. Calcium carbonate, the primary component of sedimentary rocks such as sandstone, limestone, and argillite, makes up ninety percent of an eggshell. While rocks take thousands, millions of years to form, an eggshell is created in approximately 20-24 hours within a hen’s body. These eggshells, which travel through time with the help of heat, are petrified and placed on clay pieces, arranged side by side. The installation also engages the viewer: through the vibrations caused by their footsteps, the ceramic pieces tingle as they touch each other, and the glaze crumbles and falls off.
Sea-change Through the Waves, positions the sleep cycles of two bodies in opposite corners of the gallery. Sleep, which comprises one third of a human life and up to eighty percent of the lives of some animals, can obliterate differences and disparities between species. It also defies optimization, requiring a slow passage of time to serve its regenerative purpose. Throughout the opening hours of the exhibition, the square LED-lamps—often used in offices—change colors according to the REM, non-REM waves and interruptions in the sleep cycles of these bodies, carrying the night into the day.
In Ring Around the Rosie Within the Pores, the remaining eggshells collected by the artist are ground into tiny particles and re-assembled. The vestiges of the eggs that have travelled between bodies, across species meld into one another and meander on the walls of the space as fragmented fossils.
A homonymous publication with a text by Sina Ribak titled Tending to Elusive Matter accompanies the exhibition. The publication was produced within the scope of Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt fellowship in Berlin, DE.
About the artist:
Gülşah Mursaloğlu (1989, Istanbul) completed her BA in Sociology at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, TR and received her MFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In her works, she explores materiality, matter’s agency and human and non-human temporalities. Her installations, which emerge after an in-depth and extensive research process, remain unstable in form and manifest themselves as dynamic and fluid systems through their ephemeral nature. Her works have recently been shown at Kunstraum Kreuzberg and Art Laboratory Berlin in Berlin (DE), Green Art Gallery Dubai (UAE), Protocinema and Sanatorium in Istanbul (TR). She took part in residencies and fellowships such as Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprojekt, Berlin (DE), sundaymorning@ekwc in Oisterwijk (NL), Arnis Residency (DE) and Istanbul Biennial Research and Production Programme (TR). She lives and works in Berlin.