On Wandering Among Beings: "Entre Seres" by Susanne Themlitz

article

DATE

02 Jun 2026

AUTHOR

Ayşenur Tanrıverdi

On Wandering Among Beings: "Entre Seres" by Susanne Themlitz

AUTHOR

Ayşenur Tanrıverdi

“The artist possesses a distinctive apparatus of narration. The effortless simplicity is almost enviable. The laboratory is transformed into a space where sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, space, time, form, and matter are re-configured. It is here that the exhibition’s central thread resides: transformation.”

When I was a child, there was a game we always played when we went to the beach: we would put seashells on our ears and, within that layered, inward-spiralling nacreous structure, it seemed possible to hear the waves. I was so mesmerised by this that I came to believe the object in my hand was some kind of machine powered by an internal mechanism. What I held was, at once, both natural and uncannily technical, a kind of ‘being’ suspended between the organic and the artificial.

In Susanne SD Themlitz’s exhibition Entre Seres, curated by Sofia Marçal at the Historical Museum, the artist gave a small oil painting the following title, one that immediately carried me back to this memory: Shell to the ear, heard the sea.

Entre Seres emerged from an approximately year-long process during which Themlitz engaged closely with the museum’s scientific collections and developed long-term collaborations with the curators of its natural history collections, taxidermists Ana Campos and Pedro Andrade, sound archive curator Paulo Marques, and entomology curator Roberto Keller. The exhibition also incorporates a collaborative dimension with German visual artist Roman Jungblut, whose interventions at the level of technology and sound, both in the laboratory and throughout the film’s post-production process, became integral to the exhibition’s construction.

The artist repeatedly transforms the forms of these external “beings” (seres), inventing configurations that remain charged with the potential for further mutation. What is seen here is the process through which a familiar material turns into a foreign. These beings include trees no less than stones, lilies no less than seas, raindrops no less than the breathing rhythms of animals.

And this transformation reveals itself primarily through sound. Sound here possesses a quality altogether different from that of sounds arriving from the outside to an organ of hearing. It is perceived as a force flowing outward through beings. Within this realm, sounds that emanate beyond themselves simultaneously become the manifestos of other beings, dispersing into the world through their existence. A higher form of expression emerges.

Installed within the refined setting of an analytical chemistry laboratory, Entre Seres acquires an additional sensory layer through the distinct smell of the laboratory, an atmosphere I have always found deeply fascinating. A laboratory is, above all, a space governed by rules. Normally, one does not enter without a white coat, and the threat of contamination is always present. Every movement demands slowness and precision. As one moves among these beings, the disciplined structure of the laboratory environment sharpens one’s attention to the works.

While watching the video works by Susanne SD Themlitz in collaboration with Roman Jungblut, presented at the Amphitheatre of Chimica, I was reminded of one of my favourite films, Donnie Darko, and its hallucinatory distortions of perception. Ambiguity is often present in Themlitz's practice. Yet what appears ambiguous is uncanny, while remaining open to affirmative possibilities.

In temporal slippages where different parallel universes unfold, beings replace one another, sometimes interpenetrate, and undergo metamorphosis. The world seems shaped through such instabilities.

I find a certain freedom in the cinematic language through which Themlitz approaches these transformations. Even the most abstract images retain something strangely familiar.

In the surrounding world, to think of beings is also to think of death, a condition that unfolds naturally. The artist’s response to these paradoxes is to render many meticulously constructed beings meaningless, thereby producing a lethal condition.

Gilles Deleuze writes that “death is the only judgment, and it turns judgment into a system.” Although death may appear to concern bodies alone, its immediacy, its suddenness, and its always-external arrival grant it the authentic character of a “disembodied transformation.” Susanne SD Themlitz allows us to think of death -the most rigid of all boundaries between beings- as a space within which one might linger, almost idly. Each work, carefully arranged behind glass vitrines in a state of order, becomes a small anchor cast toward immortality, a way of resisting the decree of death through the agency of “beings” themselves.

The artist possesses a distinctive apparatus of narration. The effortless simplicity is almost enviable. The laboratory is transformed into a space where sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, space, time, form, and matter are re-configured. It is here that the exhibition’s central thread resides: transformation.

The museum’s interior architecture (its semi-dark neoclassical design and ceilings that rise into vertiginous heights) lends the exhibition a distinctly Kafkaesque atmosphere. In Entre Seres, this sense of the uncanny is articulated through the dialogues the artist constructs with objects from natural history collections, where the familiar becomes estranged through passages opened within what we perceive as reality, a strategy that recalls Kafka’s narrative flow, in which the unsettling becomes a component of description.

Through the quotations curated by Sofia Marçal from Hannah Arendt, we can better situate ourselves within the universe of the exhibition: Arendt suggests that the task of mortals is bound to their capacity for production, through which they find their place in a cosmos where everything except themselves tends toward immortality.

For those wishing to encounter this cosmos, Entre Seres remains on view until 7 June at the National Museum of Natural History.

BIOGRAPHY

Ayşenur Tanrıverdi is an Istanbul-based writer, living in Lisbon since September 2022. She studied at Istanbul University and is the author of two published works of literary fiction. A regular contributor to Cumhuriyet, a major Turkish newspaper, where she focuses on Portuguese culture. Her essays and critical texts on theatre, literature, and contemporary art have also been featured in various art magazines.

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