Studio Grant holder in Stockholm 1 November 2021 – 31 January 2022

Aslı Uludağ is an artist and researcher based in Istanbul. She explores the techno-scientific, legal, and infrastructural instruments of sustainability and the imagined pasts and futures they realize. She utilizes workshops, speculative essays, archives and interactive installations to make visible the violence enacted through these processes and generate modes of intervention. Her current research investigates the development of geothermal energy in the Buyuk Menderes Graben in Turkey and its effects on the environment and the local communities. She approaches manifestations of toxicity—particularly the sensorial changes in the environment, felt and documented by the local communities—as the product of the unnegotiated folding of the deep subsurface onto the surface by geothermal energy companies. Utilizing these documents and through archiving, gathering, material investigations and speculation she attunes to the deep subsurface and generates a mode of thinking and sensing this inaccessible space to provide an alternative to narratives of simplification produced by resource determination.

Photo: Aslı Uludağ

During her residency at IASPIS, Uludag will focus on the healing cave of Charonium—an entrance into the deep subsurface—located in the ancient settlement of Acharaca which now neighbors numerous geothermal energy plants. She will explore the ancient practice and mythologies which both shaped this settlement and generated a complex relationship between the surface and the deep subsurface. This exploration will tend to a central question in her research: What other modes of engagement with the deep subsurface is possible in this particular geography and how might they guide us towards a non-extractive sustainability?

Aslı Uludağ holds a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013); and an MA in Research Architecture from Goldsmiths University, London (2019). She was a participant of the Arter Research Program, Istanbul (2020-2021); and Istanbul Biennial Study and Research Program, Istanbul (2021) Her work has been presented at The Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago (2017); Pera Museum, Istanbul (2018); and 5th Istanbul Design Biennial, Istanbul (2020). She is a member of Practices of Attunement (2020-ongoing).