The Things We Are Made Of: Sencer Vardarman

Under the Mother Earth’s Skin

Sencer Vardarman’s (b.1970, Istanbul) exhibition Under the Mother Earth’s Skin opens the exhibition programme. The exhibition consists of the three-screen video installation Wounded Ground II (19:26 min, 2020). For this work, Vardarman has created collages of images taken from space, which show opencast mines, located in eleven different countries, which people have protested against. The opencast mines cause environmental pollution, extinctions in nature and suffering among the people in the area.

In this work, Vardarman both documents and aesthetizes how humans cause the destruction of Planet Earth. The sharp and intensive images of the video work have been created by combining over 1,000 individual satellite images of each of the mines and using image processing to bring out the colours that could not be made out of individual satellite images. The mines, shot from a distance, become unreal, beautiful and captivating. At the same time, the work offers the viewer the opportunity to re-evaluate their relationship with the nature-destroying mining. The mines are used to produce fossil fuels and metals, such as gold, silver, copper and nickel, which are necessary for humans’ ever-growing consumption need.  

Vardarman examines in his works the imagery which the media, researchers and advertisements offer of urban development, industry and natural disasters. He is interested in how a viewer’s perception can be purposefully manipulated in media images. Vardarman himself also employs photo manipulation methods when editing the landscapes in the images. By combining fragments of different pictures, he creates works that make the viewer unsure of what is real and what isn’t real in the image.  

Vardarman lives and works in Berlin.

Photo: Ville Mäkilä, Museum Centre of Turku.