Project Description

Revealing What is Partly Sensed

2025

Space Microscopy – Mimetic Topologies, presented as part of the exhibition Revealing What is Partly Sensed (Bunkier Sztuki Gallery, Krakow, 2025), explores the nature of perception—how we see, sense, and understand space and matter. The project comprises three interconnected works: the video work Space Microscopy, the sculptural installation Space≞Matter, and a drawing series Frequency Levels.
Developed in collaboration with the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, the project involved the use of a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to examine fundamental materials present within the gallery space—and, by extension, any built environment—such as glass, aluminum, concrete, steel, and wood. These high-resolution scans, capturing surface topography and material composition at a microscopic scale, were digitally transformed into 3D model simulations. These models served as generative structures for the three works: simulating a dynamic landscape (video), interrogating the thresholds of sensory perception (sculpture), and mapping optical-technological interrelations (drawings).
At its core, the project questions the liminal edges of perception, proposing an experience of space and matter as fluid, alive, unstable, and subjectively constructed. It reflects on how reality is mediated through technological vision and sensory thresholds, inviting a rethinking of materiality as a shifting terrain shaped by both technological observation and imagination.

‘The starting point of the installation is the visual and material properties of the two staircases – the most common type of liminal space we encounter – separating parts of Bunkier Sztuki gallery space. In the installation, smartphone footages of both liminal spaces, are combined with a scientific “penetrative gaze” of their material components (concrete, glass, wood, metal, plaster) with a scanning electron microscope (SEM), that produces perceptible visual images by scanning the surface of a sample with a focused beam of electrons.
By combining two radically different ways of perceiving a particular liminal space, Berlot Uršula reveals visual perception as immanently liminal: to see the shape/image presupposes that we ignore the matter of which it is composed; the visual image is always dependent on the radiation, most often radiation of light relative to the material surface of the object; furthermore, although the matter may appear as topological space, it is at the same time vibrant.’
Dr. Kaja Kraner, curator

Collaboration and thanks: Prof. Dr. Sašo Šturm, Jožef Stefan Institute, Department of Nanostructured Materials.