SPACE invites one artist to produce a yearlong series of images for a public-facing billboard located on the east façade of Mercer Union.
Mercer Union invites artist Alize Zortlutuna to develop a yearlong series of works titled Surface Tension for the SPACE Billboard Commission in 2025-26. Working across video, performance, text, and sculpture, Zorlutuna’s practice uses gesture, repetition, and ritual to consider the relationships between bodies and ecologies. Often beginning with the forms and narratives that we carry with us, the artist’s work attunes to queer sensibilities for enlivening embodied and ancestral knowledges.
Their recent projects emerge from a longstanding interest in the traditional hydrographic printing technique of Ebru, and include works on textile and paper that resist mastery of conventional patterns in favour of emergent forms. At Mercer Union, the artist performs a sculptural study of the distinct marbled patterns of Ebru by using large-format digital reproduction and physical interventions. The series’ title alludes to the delicate and fundamental act of negotiation between water and suspended natural pigments that is central to the practice of Ebru. The artist explores this notion as a conceptual framework for reading a visual field and introduces a responsive sculptural language of cuts and folds that trace and transform the image.
For Zorlutuna, Ebru speaks to the moment when land and water, hand and breath, touch in a process of co-becoming. In each of the three sculptural banners, careful incisions splay the image, breaking its membrane to release the movements humming within. As changing light, brushing wind, and beading water act upon the works’ surface, a kinetic dialogue begins with the natural elements that were momentarily stilled in each composition.
Surface Tension: To Comb [Tarak] is the final edition in the yearlong series. The work is accompanied by a forthcoming text by Joy Xiang.
Tarak is the Ebru technique in which a comb is dragged across the surface of the water and pigment, rippling the colours in intricate designs. To comb is to tend, to untangle, to put into order what is unruly. It is to unknot, to separate, to thoughtfully and carefully pull something away from something else. With gentleness and discernment, we comb archives, memories, hair. Queering the gesture of combing earth and water, this edition uses Tarak in undulating waves and swooping curves that break with tradition, offering a form, a tending, that curves around unexpected corners.
Alize Zorlutuna
