SANATORIUM presents Didem Erbaş’s solo exhibition “As the Land Falls Apart” from March 7 to May 3, 2025. “As the Land Falls Apart” examines the processes of existence and extinction of living species through spatial constructions, employing a multilayered perspective across various materials and media.
The installation at the center of the exhibition is composed of elements made from various materials such as plastic bottles, epoxy, phosphorescent pigment, latex, lead, metal, and ceramics. These elements are positioned on a gridded structure and aluminum pedestals, offering a cross-section of both the earth's surface and the underground. This labyrinth-like system references Das Kriegspiel, an 18th-century strategic war game, highlighting themes of spatial mobility and displacement. The presentation of hidden objects and videos within the installation evokes a zoological or archaeological museum. The grid structure mimics the “target” symbol seen in the video works within the installation. The aerial, drone-like gaze silently observing from above alludes to surveillance and control mechanisms.
Other works throughout the exhibition reference the underground and biological processes. These objects evoke laboratory-grown microorganisms and underground pipelines. The artist’s photograms—created by exposing objects such as dead insects, charging cables, and snail shells to sunlight and chemical dyes—result from her research at The Warburg Institute in London and her studies on invertebrate fossils in Turkey. The neon pigments on the drawings become visible under UV light, referencing target-tracking systems used in military surveillance technologies.
A video projected onto the wall features a text read by Helen Brecht, accompanied by various visuals. The black-and-white SEM (Scanning Electron Microscope) images reveal the microstructures of different objects and materials, interwoven with anonymous war footage and videos that investigate the survival strategies of living beings. These sharp juxtapositions of violence, surveillance, and the struggle for survival create an organic link between the video and the installation.
Drawing from Didem Erbaş’s material and archive-based practice, As the Land Falls Apart presents the artist’s research about nature and technology, biology and surveillance, memory and extinction through a multilayered installation.
About the Artist:
Didem Erbaş is an artist born in Istanbul, where she currently lives and works. She earned her BA in Painting from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University and her MA in Visual Arts and Visual Communication Design from Sabancı University. Her practice engages with the sociopolitical issues of geography she lives in while exploring themes such as land, habitat, tracking, and spatial transformation. Architecture, shifting perspectives, and the human impact on nature are at the center of the concerns of her work. Through her research, she investigates war strategies, unmanned aerial vehicles, and the coexistence of small terrestrial creatures in relation to the traces of human-induced destruction.
Erbaş has participated in numerous exhibitions in Turkey, the US, London, Berlin, and Paris. She was an artist-in-residence at Cité Internationale des Arts in France with the support of IKSV. In January - February 2024, she continued her research at Delfina Foundation in London, supported by SAHA Foundation. Most recently, in 2024, she participated in the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York with the support of the Turkish-American Society. She is currently pursuing her PhD degree at Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.