In her current exhibition, “Apocalypse Now and Then” at the Deste Foundation’s Slaughterhouse project space on the Greek island of Hydra, the Romanian-born sculptor mines this liminal space between decay and endurance, making relics for a civilization that might already be crumbling. Embracing bronze, a medium she called “cliché,” at least in the context of sculpture, Ursuţa casts studio scraps and dollar-store detritus into absurd totems that meditate on the nature of time, societal collapse, and the afterlives of objects—and by extension, us.
“Disaster is an ongoing process, not just a specific event,” she told me over coffee in the courtyard of her Hydra hotel. While there can be precipitating moments of demise, she explained, the timeline of decay is a long one. “It’s not as narratively satisfying to think about it that way. It’s so much easier to just say, ‘Okay, this is the point at which there is a before and an after.’”