This is a temporary Address, 24-part text installation, Hošek Contemporary, Berlin, 2026, Photo: ©Kathrin Tschirner
Curatorial text by Florencia Incarbone
In chemistry, a suspension is described as an unstable state in which two substances coexist without fully dissolving into one another. In this state, a solid and a liquid fail to reach a definitive reconciliation. Matter floats, held in a fragile equilibrium for a certain amount of time. Movement is required to produce this suspended condition—an exception in which particles hover, resisting complete dissolution, displaying a transient form: a faint cloud, an opaque thickness. Yet gravity and time persist. Coexistence is provisional: slowly, particles give way and fall. For a brief moment, these two materials managed to inhabit the same space without renouncing their singularity.
Suspension, in this sense, becomes a choreography between proximity and distance—a moment in which two worlds coexist through temporary integration. This liminal condition can extend beyond matter into lived experience, when encounters with new geographies open the possibility of reconfiguring a singular state of being.
Within every territory lies a sediment of the past that is ready to be uncovered. While doing so multiple genealogies might appear, exposing overlooked events, lost meanings, and forgotten names. In this shifting field, naming can become an attempt to locate both place and self, even if temporarily. So, what does it mean to inhabit a foreign territory, a place selected by choice yet where belonging has not yet fully taken hold? Perhaps it requires the invention of flexible strategies—adaptive tools constantly rearranging their own functions as needed.
Ece Eldek’s practice unfolds within this logic of adjustment. Through words, objects, sound, and moving image, she articulates an exploration of a personal yet resonant experience, where instability not resolved but sustained is used as method. To achieve this, a unique place has been chosen: a historical riverboat moored in a canal, lingering between the stillness and movement of the river. In the boat, modular, evocative verses inscribed on metal structures set on the walls appear as thoughts that might have surfaced in the mind. Through these fragments, suspended between a sense of unease and possibility, the artist constructs an intangible literary structure with multiple entries, exits and forking paths which resist linear reading.
“Movement is not escape”, reads one of the statements by Eldek, perhaps alluding to the small ladders that emerge from the openings created by the dislodged floorboards. While resting on the supporting structure of the boat they seem to extend an invitation to move upward—to lift one imaginary foot after another without having the certainty of where they might take you. Each ladder may reveal a new space, offering yet another possibility or they might materialize in an unexpected setting altogether. Indeed, one of them also appears on a video. This object originally designed to connect spaces is observed by a woman seen from the back as she contemplates it in detail. Through her gaze and over time, these ladders may also acquire a poetic potential: that of inhabiting the edges and the intersections.
Across these varied elements, Eldek articulates a series of shifting supports—points of temporary stability that emerge from a distilled personal experience and transform space and time, like a tide that continuously rewrites the coastline. In this context of uncertainty, even an obstacle can trigger a practice which makes it possible for a system of poetic anchors to take shape. Some of them are fragile and can easily be discarded; others are heavier, more secured in place, while still permitting one to set free and drift away. Even grounding, then, is provisional—an arrangement in dialogue with instability and change.
In this regard, to remain in motion implies sustaining oneself in the interval itself, where clear orientation appears and disappears simultaneously. Belonging takes form only as a fleeting condition that does not cancel difference, but holds it in suspension—however briefly—before it transforms again.
