leftover exhibition investigates re-entry of industrial waste into production cycles

Buşra Tunç explores industrial remnants in her solo exhibition

Buşra Tunç presents Leftover, her solo exhibition at Fener House in Istanbul, which explores industrial remnants, atmospheric elements of workshops, and production waste through the lens of industrial archaeology. The exhibition stems from Tunç’s extensive research within a medium-scale complex focusing on serial production. She questions the fate of these leftovers, their reentry into production cycles, and how they form their own economies and sociologies. The accumulated powder coatings, metal shavings, oxidation, and scraps at these production sites resemble geological formations, indicating a continuous process battling decay and entropy. Leftover examines the unintended aesthetics of materials that failed to become products due to production errors, unforeseen possibilities, and associated losses.

all images by Emirkan Cörüt, courtesy of Buşra Tunç

leftover features a machine room processing raw material

Buşra Tunç investigates environments such as metal workshops, paint shops, and plastic injection molding factories, examining how traces of time and material manifest in architecture, human bodies, and psychology. The exhibition reflects on concepts of invisible labor, interrupted time, and lost matter. In the basement, the Turkish artist sets up a room where a functioning machine processes raw material, injects it, and molds it. This process is captured in videos that trace the machine’s coordinates, highlighting connections with the human body through vibrations, tremors, interlocking, and separations of machine parts. The circulation area features production residues, while a rubber spill in the main area exemplifies the irregular materials the artist uses to question normative contexts and daily functions. 

a rubber spill from a constructed experimental landscape

construction for a vertical garden-like formation

investigating for atmospheric elements of workshops within the context of industrial archaeology

the basement of the exhibition space as a scene from industrial complex

fragments of post-apocalyptic crisis scene

searching for the connections with the machine and the human body

this research shaped around the ideas of invisible labor, the interrupted time and lost matter

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leftover objects of industrial archaeology

exploring the possibilities and unintended aesthetics of leftover materials

Buşra Tunç's Leftover explores industrial remnants at Fener House

Buşra Tunç investigates environments such as metal workshops, paint shops, and plastic injection molding factories

examining how traces of time and material manifest in architecture, human bodies, and psychology

in the basement, the Turkish artist sets up a room where a functioning machine processes raw material

the circulation area features production residues

project info:

name: leftover: industrial space as an excavation site
artist: Buşra Tunç | @tuncbu
curator: Ekmel Ertan | @eertan
location: Fener House, Istanbul, Turkey
concepts photography and video recordings: Emirkan Cörüt | @emirkan_corut
exhibition photography: Emirkan Cörüt | @emirkan_corut

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edited by: thomai tsimpou | designboom