Subsurfaces unfolds through a series of works approaching the ground as a site of accumulation where matter, memory, and mediation establish intersections that remain in force over time. Drawing from Ivan Šuković’s long-standing relationship with specific locations in Montenegro, this newly developed body of works—presented in Athens for the first time— engages with territories shaped by geological flux and layered historical conditions marked by conflict and displacement. The ground registers as a dense and dynamic medium, composed of sediments, organic deposits, mineral traces, and residues of human activity —a place where matter records movement and where movement feeds into matter, provoking all kinds of transmutations.
This sense of the ground as process is at the core of the exhibition. Slow chemical alterations, technological mediations, and historical residues converge into forms that hold together different durations. Šuković works articulate these convergences by activating material processes through which the ground participates in the formation of the image.
The choice of locations is emotionally and historically charged. Šuković collects soil from places that served as safe zones in the atmosphere of political anxiety he experienced as a child. The locations mark points of interruption, temporary pauses in a movement governed by uncertainty, anticipation, and the emotional charge of a historical period when everything was in a constant state of flux. A landscape one ventures upon while experiencing emotional uncertainty may appear with heightened clarity: a fragment of a forest, a slope, a patch of earth, a certain colour, a smell, an opening in the terrain that becomes memorable and sometimes idealised. The chosen sites carry this double charge. They belong to tangible geographies, yet also to an imagination that forms around the need to make a scene bearable enough to inhabit, even for a brief period of time.
The use of soil as pigment establishes a material circuit that situates the ground within the surface of the work. Soil extracted from these specific locations undergoes microbiological processing in order to produce pigments, thereby introducing a chain of transformations that gradually alter its composition. As time goes by, the resulting substances continue to undergo changes. The brass panels on which the landscapes are rendered register this ongoing activity, their surfaces subtly shifting in colour as well as in texture. The image thus unfolds as a temporal field, shaped by processes that extend well beyond the moment of its making.
Dirt and colour form a complex and constantly shifting alliance. Soil carries an ordinary material presence, something handled, stepped on, displaced, contaminated, gathered under the fingernails, carried under one’s shoe soles, transported by wind and water. Once processed into pigment, it enters the history of painting, the history of image-making, the history of landscape as a site of projection and desire. Mary Douglas’s formulation of dirt as “matter out of place” resonates here, as soil shifts between categories: ground, sample, residue, pigment, image, memory. With each displacement, its status is redefined.
The use of brass introduces a measured form of monumentality. This material bears associations to durability and public inscriptions, often linked to commemorative plaques, public signage, and institutional memory. Within the exhibition, these associations are slightly displaced, as the panels evoke objects that could belong to a civic archive or a museum display.
Šuković points to an exact location, while the image itself opens onto the fraught theatre of recollection. A place can be measured, named, and mapped, while the experience attached to it exceeds the economy of data. Herein lies one of the exhibition’s most compelling features: the very same soil that testifies to the existence of the place participates in its reimagined configuration.
A different articulation of this same relation emerges from the sculptural condensation the landscape undergoes in the context of the exhibition. A glacier—generated from aerial survey data and materialized through digital fabrication—compresses a large expanse into a single diorama in the form of a miniature integrated into a wall structure. The process involves multiple stages of mediation, from the capture of the landscape using drone imaging to its translation into a digital model and its subsequent fabrication through CNC technology. Each stage leaves a trace that remains legible within the final object. Geological time intersects with the temporality of digital image capturing, producing a surface that holds multiple durations. The glacier emerges as a site where all these temporalities converge, allowing the viewer to encounter a landscape that has undergone successive reconfigurations.
Glaciers often convey cultural fantasies of distance, purity, and a quasi-sublime sense of remoteness. In this case, however, the glacier is adjusted to fit into a smaller, more intimate scale that is closer to the human body and to architectural designs. Its form retains the memory of terrain through technological capture, yet its reduced scale introduces another kind of proximity, almost like an object yielded by a child’s memory after an experience that surpassed its capacity to fully comprehend it. The work brings together geological duration and personal recollection into one compressed form. It becomes a fragment of a landscape that has been processed by machines, memory, and touch.
The use of plinth-like supports introduces a familiar exhibition language while subtly echoing gestures of elevation associated with ritual practices. The object becomes something that can be approached and observed; while its scale seems to welcome proximity, its situation in space maintains a certain degree of distance. Language enters the exhibition through a reflective mechanism that projects text into space. Words appear and dissolve as the viewer moves across the space, with their legibility being dependent on the interplay between light, surface, and position. Reading unfolds as a temporal process, shaped by shifts in perspective and orientation. Meaning is shaped through partial encounters—moments of alignment that remain open to variation, complexity, and multiplicity.
Being an epitaph, the work adopts the tone of memorial address while situating that address into a condition of optical fragility. The epitaph is turned into more of a mode of encounter than a fixed monument. It asks the viewer to inhabit the instability of reading, to accept the fact that meaning arrives through constant readjustment, through a bodily negotiation with its surroundings. A rotating industrial mechanism sets off a further modulation of time and image. A photographic landscape is permanently perceptible along the surface of the machine. Each rotation retraces the same path while accumulating subtle variations through friction and wear. The repetition this mechanism sets in motion produces not only a temporal structure but also a specific rhythm of viewing and moving. The presence of the circular saw also introduces themes of labour and risk. The landscape pivots around a tool associated with construction, extraction, and force. Its rotation produces an image caught between scenery and operation, between viewing and a sense of decay. The machine renders visible the passing of time through showcasing the slow degeneration of matter. In the first instance, earth becomes pigment; in the second, landscape becomes moving matter, subject to mechanical friction. In both instances, image-making incurs a material as well as a physical cost.
A subtle tactile tension runs across the exhibition. The reflective hardness of the metal contrasts with softer, more absorbent materials such as wool felt or velvet that shift our perception of surfaces and enable us to encounter the works while moving between resistance and absorption, between exposure and a sense of containment.
In the present moment, the work takes on almost inevitable resonance. Landscapes shaped by rupture, environmental transformation, resource extraction, and forced displacement circulate widely, while images of war zones and environmental disasters flash across screens, producing a sense of proximity that combines immediacy with distance. We are confronted with an abundance of images, even as the material realities they reference remain difficult to grasp. Subsurfaces engages directly with this situation and focuses on the relation between image and ground at a moment when images of destruction, migration, and territorial violence are constantly being produced, shared, and consumed. The exhibition turns its attention to material forms—soil, pigment, brass, and moving machinery—and poses the question how to retain the experience when the image alone is no longer sufficient; how a landscape bears the weight of the events that traverse it; and how imagination intervenes when tangible reality becomes difficult to get one’s head around. These traces circulate through fragments, through sensory impressions that shape our experience of space. The exhibition situates this experience amid a broader material framework, where personal memory intersects with territorial and historical processes.