Deep time is not a collection of events that happened billions or millions of years ago. It is time, the effects of which are our reality, whose consequences form the earth as we know it. It continues to be ubiquitous in rocks, oceans, atmosphere and extraterrestrial planets, star systems, throughout the cosmos.
What is deep time? Or what is deep in time? Here we are dealing with what is before human, what comes before it. A “natural” idea is to accept that this is a point or part of a stretch of time that stretches like a straight string, long, long before the point we are in. Everything deep in time is obsolete, belongs to a mute and silent past. The presuppositions that establish the naturalness of this idea are the legacy of Modernity and the Age of Enlightenment. These are the presuppositions that one threshold has been crossed with the emergence of human in history, and another threshold has been crossed with modernity, thus entering the age of Reason and Intelligence, establishing new ways of comprehending the world and solving the problems we encounter on its surface: Homo Sapiens and Homo Faber dominated nature. Undoubtedly, human is arrogant. Thinking this way has grounded our arrogance and reassured us for several centuries. It enabled us to conceive of our species as a Subject in the face of the passive Objecthood of other living and non-living things. We were not only human beings who knew and used tools, we also gave shape to other living and non-living things, the earth, thanks to our knowledge and tools.
Sinem Dişli shows us a completely different way of thinking about deep time. First of all, time accumulates: stars die, explode and disperse; the dust of the scattered star turns into planets, becomes mountains and rocks. These rocks dissolve, mix with water, and recombine into living things, their enzymes, their skeletons. The exhibition Deep Time: Faces of Matter is based on an intense interest in the way time accumulates in cosmic and geological strata, and in the metamorphoses of matter as accumulated time through these strata. With Dişli's works, we realize that deep time is not the time of the past, but the time of what is under our feet, even that which traverses all living and non-living things. It is the time to exist for the one who rumbles deeply, aside from being silent, who organizes and produces the alphabets aside from being mute. Deep time is the time of matter.
Deep time is not a collection of events that happened billions or millions of years ago. It is time, the effects of which are our reality, whose consequences form the earth as we know it. It continues to be ubiquitous in rocks, oceans, atmosphere and extraterrestrial planets, star systems, throughout the cosmos. But new methods are required to understand this and to investigate this stratum. These are methods that we cannot fully comprehend as long as we think of the artist as someone who applies the forms she creates out of nothing to a passive mass of matter. By recreating the methods of archeology, geology, and 19th century farmers that established the bond they established with the earth, by being inspired by them, Dişli points to a claim about the essence of art. First of all, it is necessary to set aside the prejudice that matter is identified with passivity and form with activity, and that they reside in two separate realms, one earthly and the other spiritual. In the landscape we find before us through the practices of Dişli, form means organization and is the expression of the self-organizing power of matter itself. Form does not come from a mental and spiritual afterworld and haunt matter. Rather, it is the product of matter itself's capacity to ceaselessly create new worlds.
So we are faced with minerals: from limestone rocks to the bird's skeleton and then to the bird's egg. These are just a few of the dozens of organizations that calcium and other minerals once produced in the heart of a star are capable of. If art is the activity of making the continuities and separations that we could not perceive before, the forces at work perceptible on one side, then it is possible to say that the art practice that traverses the Deep Time exhibition makes the continuities from the world of minerals to the vitality sensible and intelligible. These continuities are continuities that connect deep time to the present, opening it to the future, perhaps a deep future.
However, contemplating the organizational capacities of matter allows us to get only half the way out of Modernity, which is based on the idea that human is endowed with an excessive power and opens a great gap in time. It's a well-known story by now: with Homo Erectus, upright posture freed the hand from being a walking organ, providing the conditions to transform it (with the help of the position of the thumbs on the hand) into a grasping organ. In the sequence of transformations this initiated, the mouth also ceased to be an organ of grasping, and thus became an organ of whistling, singing and speech. It can be said that the history of human as it is today is, in a way, the history of the hand, in this history the hand is the organ of shaping the earth.
From one point of view, —Modernity is right about that— the hand is an organ of interruption. It cuts off the flow of rivers, builds dams. It cuts off the slow flow of rocks over millions of years, building caves, houses, art galleries out of them. But the first thing to see is that the hand is always tied to the stone. The hand either directly grasps the stone, strikes one on another, or grasps another tool that eventually grasps the stone. There is certainly a neural network going from the hand to the brain, but what justification can there be for saying that this is a relation ontologically disparate from and superior to the connections between the fingers and the stone? The hand is already bone, calcium and phosphorus, various forms of matter flow in its veins, its muscles are the organization of matter. Minerals carry electrochemical messages in nerve endings. The brain is a giant mineral.
The hand, then, is not just an organ of interruption. The hand is also an organ of continuity. It is always in the middle of one or a series of processes: cosmic and geological processes that started billions of years ago, biological processes that started millions of years ago... It is the product of them. The hand can accelerate and direct these processes as well as interrupt them. If a special place is to be given to the hand, it can rather be said that it is an organ of mediation: it is part of the self-organizing processes of form-hungry matter. The hand mediates the alliances and conflicts of our bodies, the self-organized matter, with the other bodies.
That's why it's up to the experimenter hand to invent new methods of manifestation that go from matter to form. This hand may be the hand of the farmer who measures the humus content of the soil by means of chemical chromatography, or the hand of the geologist who reduces the millions of years of geological history to the minutes in the sandbox. But above all, it is the hand of the artist. It is the hand that puts into effect the new capacities of matter, which is never alone in an abstract way, always already organized in bodies, that draws out new powers and new forms from it, and mediates them: If each new organization is the product of a process that dissolves the obvious powers and functions of the previous ones, separates them into new capacities and somehow puts them into a new composition, the hand is like the catalyst for that process. It is a catalyst when striking stone on stone and writing the basic codes for artificial intelligence.
Doesn't the importance of the tool also lie here? On the one hand, it is an extension of the hand, opening it to new capacities, serving to create new unknown actions or to enact existing actions more vigorously or sensitively. But this human-centered view can only partially comprehend the real capacities of the tool. Bone tools are not only an extension of the action of the guiding hand that we rub back into the brain and mind, they are also another transformation of, another form of organization of minerals. But even that is still not enough. The tool also extends from other bodies to the hand, belongs to their history, is deep. It conveys their resistances, limits and thresholds to the hand; with their own resistances. If there is hand-to-hand learning, or even self-learning, in the craftsman's or artist's workshop, here the pedagogue is the tool. The apprentice follows the master's hand, the tool moves on the bodies, but learning cannot be reduced to the imitation of the seen action. Because the apprentice needs to take the tool in her hand and discover the strengths and weaknesses of the tool, her hand and the other bodies it mediates. In this way, she learns to put new capacities to work for her hand, namely her nervous system, muscles and bones.
But all this should not lead us to assume that our effects are insignificant. On the contrary. In the ever-changing asymmetries of the interactions of organized matters, we witness the overpowering of the hand and brain from the subtle Anthropocene to the Capitalocene, marked by the beginning of agriculture and the transformation of forests into farmland. The basis of this situation is neither a weakness that can be called our nature, nor a supernatural trait of our brain. Rather, the matter is that the ideas secreted by the brain and the organizational processes catalyzed, that is, accelerated by the hand gradually turn against life in general. This black marble is the silent witness of how the wheels of industry and daily life bring together the potentials of accumulated matter as deep time in a way that triggers the extinction of plants and animals. Our glow lamps are connected to hydroelectric power plants, thermal plants and mines that are destroying ecosystems and colonizing geographies. Here, neither the divine vision established nor our sleight of hand, which erases something from the image, can save us. Maybe this is the betrayal of the hand to human. So the question is: What can we rely on in an age when our extinction can be imagined as an almost inevitable end? On the impudence of life that proliferates impudently on that little boulder, that organizes deep time directly into vitality. Human can be arrogant, life is impudent.
In the Deep Time exhibition, we comprehend the dates of the acquisition of faces of matter. The earth did not wait for human to take form. The shaping of human was also a product of earth's vital forces. These stones, minerals, colours, tools, blood and bone, all are the faces of matter. We can no longer put ourselves at the beginning of history, as if everything were born of human, or at the end of deep history, as if everything were drawn towards the birth of human. Just as a stone is in the middle of geological history, so is human in the middle of everything. Deep time is our machines, deep time is muscle and vein, rock and paint. It is the electric lamp lighting in our streets, the word that rises from our throat.
So time doesn't just accumulate. Instead of moving forward leaving the past behind like a straight line, it always spirals by opening another layer of the past to the present and the future. It is knitted with gravitational fields where some processes are concentrated and centrifugal fields where some processes are accelerated. Here is Mesopotamia, here is the wheat, here is the temple. Geography becomes history here, a leap takes place. But at the same time, history becomes geography, accumulating as stones, seeds, and animal remains for the geologist and archaeologist to discover. Our museums are wrong. There is no separate history of Human and Nature, only a natural history of human and a history of becoming human of nature. This history can no longer be read as a date in which tools and institutions, as prophesied by the modern science of categorization, mark the increase in hu(man)'s domination of "nature". Tools are mixed with dreams, institutions with games. The force that moves our bodies and hands is the same impudent force of life that produces planets from stars, living things from minerals, words out of air.
Through her art practice, Dişli asks questions that require us to turn history upside down, tear up the veil of our arrogance, re-examine our own practices and our existence in the sequence of metamorphoses of matter, and most importantly, question the face we have been wearing for several centuries. With the meticulousness of an archaeologist, the manners of a geologist, the love of the land of a farmer, and the sensitivity of an artist, it makes you feel that behind every face of matter lies the potential of another face, and that a new transformation, a new face, is also possible in the sequence of transformations. Let's open our hearts to matter with the artist who opens art to the heart of matter or opens the heart of art to the activity of matter. Let matter take a thousand and one new faces there, and life impudently re-sprout from the ruins of a civilization of arrogance.