Serkan Demir’s fifth solo exhibition at .artSümer, titled We Once Believed the Planet was Tender, will be on view from May 9 to June 20.
The exhibition takes shape through a reading of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s poetic work Terre des Hommes*, drawing on texts informed by his topographical observations and lived experiences as a pilot above the horizon. The phrase We thought the planet was moist and loving**, found in the chapter The Plane and the Planet—itself rooted in Saint-Exupéry’s long postal and exploratory flights over North Africa—serves as a conceptual point of departure for the exhibition.
For Saint-Exupéry, the airplane is not merely an advanced machine but a powerful instrument of observation and comprehension. By lifting the human gaze above the horizon, it offers a radically altered perception of the world: a single, unified blue planet in which man-made borders dissolve and all forms of life appear suspended at an equal distance. From this vantage point, the divisions inscribed on maps—security barriers, barbed wire, and other mechanisms of separation—lose their authority and begin to fade.
This act of ascent (or descent) flattens vertical hierarchies into a horizontal field, equalizing distances and collapsing differences. A similar shift in perception can be found in the experience of Ron Garan, who, after spending 178 days aboard the International Space Station and orbiting Earth nearly 3,000 times, returned with a profoundly transformed understanding of humanity’s place in the world. Such a perspective is both revelatory and unsettling, suggesting an expanded yet fragile awareness.
For Garan, viewing Earth from above revealed that “humanity lives in an illusion.” Within this context, the phrase We thought the planet was moist and loving resonates less as a misperception than as a fragile, almost dystopian longing. In Saint-Exupéry’s narrative, the world emerges simultaneously as a perilous terrain and as a salvational image—at once threatened and full of possibility.
Echoing this tension, the exhibition constructs a dystopian atmosphere that not only evokes anxiety about the future but also gestures toward the persistence of chaos across time. Past, present, and future collapse into one another, shaping a fluid and unsettled perception of temporality.
In this exhibition, the artist revisits the origins of his earlier works, examining both the world’s topographical features and the phenomena that shape them through a lens of irony. Situated within the context of contemporary reality, this practice articulates references drawn from diverse artistic disciplines, expressed through sculptures, installations, and ready-made objects realized with a range of materials and techniques, all unified by a poetic sensibility. Elements such as metal saws, speech bubbles and text, maps, the debris of modern cities, and structures assembled with a puzzle-like logic form the foundation of a critical visual language. This multifaceted exploration, operating at the intersection of concept and material, may ultimately be understood as a search for a new world.