A choreography of resistance in three acts
- Naz Cuguoğlu
- 7 Eki
- 8 dakikada okunur
Elif Uras’s solo exhibition Earth on Their Hands, which reflects on themes of women’s labor, solidarity, and support, is on view at Galerist from September 15 to November 8, 2025. We are sharing Naz Cuguoğlu’s exhibition text, which approaches Earth on Their Hands in three acts
Words: Naz Cuguoğlu
Elif Uras, Earth on Their Hands, 2025, Exhibition view
Prologue
Elif Uras, Earth on Their Hands, 2025, Terra sigillata, underglaze, glaze and gold luster on quartz tile, triptych, 40x90 cm
Clay remembers what we forget. It holds the print of the hand, the trace of the body, the pressure of time. In Elif Uras’s Earth on Their Hands, the ceramic surface becomes both archive and prophecy: a space where the invisible labor of women, daily, generational, elemental, is reimagined in gold, marked into vessels, plates, and coins, and elevated to a mythology of care, protest, and persistence. Uras brings together slip-cast forms from Iznik (the historic center of Turkish pottery since the Ottoman era) and wheel-thrown, hand-carved bodies from her New York studio. The duality is not simply geographic, it is conceptual, spanning traditional craft and contemporary critique, the domestic and the political, the sculptural and the social.
The exhibition unfolds not as a linear survey but as a procession. Each room opens a chapter in a speculative cosmology: of matriarchal economies, of resistance shaped by fire, of hammams transformed into councils, of bodies gilded by gesture. Uras’s world is one where the vessel is not passive but alive, imbued with memory, voice, and agency. Here, ornament is not decoration, but data. Glaze becomes language. Gold is not wealth, but tribute.
Gold flows throughout this body of work, marking the women figures, not as a capitalist spectacle, but as an intimate act of devotion. In Anatolia, women have long worked with gold, as makers of jewelry, as participants in the altın günü (gold day), as givers in a gift economy built on trust. In Uras’s hands, gold luster becomes a feminist tactic: to gild the unnoticed, to sanctify the mundane. (1)
Act 1: Bodies that carry the world
From left to right: Elif Uras, Craft Palace, 2025, Terra sigillata, underglaze, glaze, gold luster on stoneware, 68x25x25 cm Elif Uras, Fire in Their Hands, 2025, Terra sigillata, underglaze, glaze, gold luster on stoneware, 70x28x28 cm
Elif Uras, Matriarchal Resistance, 2025, Terra sigillata, underglaze, glaze, gold luster on stoneware, 65x45x45 cm
“Woman is not only the pillar of the home, but also of the world.”
- Fatma Aliye (2)
The exhibition opens with three pedestals that hold three worlds, each rooted in gesture, transformation, and defense. They rise like sentinels in a temple of labor, each marking a station of domestic alchemy.
The first work, titled Craft Palace, presents a quiet labor dance: women ironing, drying their hair, weaving textiles, making ceramics, sweeping, cooking. These figures are not passive archetypes of womanhood, but active bodies, pressed into clay, gilded, and in relief. They bear the repetitive, imperfect, essential gestures of labor. Elif Uras lifts them from the floors of the home and places them atop pedestals, where their daily acts are transfigured into myth.
These gestures echo prehistoric Anatolian traditions, in which ceramic-making and weaving were acts of sustenance and survival. In the artist’s rendering, the broom becomes a staff, the iron a relic, the body a vessel of skill. As Uras reminds us, the history of pottery is rooted in agriculture: early ceramics were created to store and preserve food. Decoration followed utility, and over time, vessels evolved into objects of ritual and aesthetic contemplation. One of the earliest known ceramic artifacts is a fired clay figurine of a woman, life-giving, symbolic, foundational, predating even the first agricultural pots. Here, Uras folds the archaic and the contemporary into one another, showing how craft was never outside of art, how labor has always been a form of authorship.
The second work, Fire in Their Hands burns, not literally, but conceptually. It holds a work that draws a parallel between two transformative, alchemical rituals: cooking and ceramics. Both demand fire. Both require precision, intuition, and time. And both have long been historically coded as feminine, assigned to the domestic sphere and systematically devalued. In this work, fire becomes a metaphor for transformation. Just as women preserve food in ceramic jars, Uras preserves memory on ceramic skin. Each glaze holds a story. Each vessel is a container of both nourishment and resistance.
The final work, Matriarchal Resistance depicts a protest. Women stand with arms wrapped around trees; their faces turned to the wind. This scene pays homage to the ongoing resistance to protect forest lands, where rural women have been at the forefront of protests against plans to destroy the trees for mining. These women, many of them olive growers and villagers, have physically stood between bulldozers and the trees, defending their lands, livelihoods, and ecosystems. The struggle continues, not only on the ground, but through national legislation that increasingly threatens communal and agricultural lands with mineral and energy extraction projects.
These figures are not martyrs; they are warriors. Rural, matriarchal, fierce. Their bodies are neither fragile nor idealized. They are grounded, elemental, of the earth: rooted in stance and form. Clay remembers them. Gold adorns them, not to embellish, but to honor. In Uras’s hands, gold ceases to be a patriarchal symbol of power. Instead, it becomes a tribute to women’s unpaid, unrecorded labor. A coin of care. A mythology of maintenance.
Act 2: The women’s council
From left to right: Elif Uras, Spray Booth II, 2024, Underglaze, glaze, gold luster on stoneware, ⌀ 26,5 cm Elif Uras, Production Line, 2023, Underglaze, glaze, gold luster on stoneware, ⌀ 27 cm Elif Uras, Lunar Eruption, 2025, Underglaze, glaze, gold luster on stoneware, ⌀ 30 cm
“Our kitchens and bedrooms and backyards were our territories of resistance.”
- Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984) (3)
A round table, without a table. Plates float across the wall like echoes of a gathering that never ended. Women dance, nap, gossip, resist, play music, and care for one another. Some wear house shoes, others cradle trees.
These are not portraits; they are collective memories, gestures made mythic. Elif Uras draws from the tradition of kadınlar meclisi (women’s councils) and informal networks of mutual aid that flourished beyond the reach of official power. She evokes Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s early 18th-century accounts of the Ottoman bathhouse, which were intimate spaces of bodily care, political conversation, and women’s autonomy. But here, unlike orientalist visions, these are not spaces for the voyeur. They are diagrams of solidarity.
The plate is a vessel, yes, but also a void. A site of gathering and a trace of what’s been shared. An empty plate has always implied either hunger or offering, absence or abundance. Uras uses it as a surface of convergence. Some plates hold coins, echoing systems of exchange both economic and symbolic. Others ripple with optical patterns or resemble tables set for assembly. Together, they form a speculative archive of communal resilience, of women making worlds together, again and again
Act 3: Bodies becoming monument
From left to right: Elif Uras, Pink Taurus, 2025, Underglaze, glaze, gold luster on stonepaste, 50 x 40 x 37 cm Elif Uras, Totem of Spirals, 2025, Underglaze and glaze on stonepaste, 77 x 30 x 16 cm Elif Uras, Diamond Torso, 2025, Underglaze and glaze on stonepaste, 46 x 23 x 23 cm
This space holds ceramic forms with wide hips, narrow necks, and deep bellies. Placed on a multi-level platform, they suggest both elevation and collective ascent. Each figure maintains its own posture, yet together they form a procession, an embodiment of bodily labor made sacred through repetition and form.
In this room, the vessel is no longer a metaphor. It becomes body. It becomes monument. There is movement forward: an upward step, a gesture toward progress and renewal.
Earth on Their Hands is not an elegy for lost traditions, but a celebration of the persistence of form, gesture, and communal gathering. Elif Uras offers not nostalgia, but transformation. Her surfaces, alternating between raw and glazed, carved and burnished, are marked with gold inlays that follow the rhythms of hands and tools. This is where her process becomes most visible: a choreography of carving into semi-soft clay, of drawing directly onto the form, and of layering slips and glazes through multiple firings. These vessels do not simply contain narrative; they carry labour itself: the labor of making, of holding, of surviving.
Epilogue: An alternative history
Elif Uras, Earth on Their Hands, 2025, Exhibition view
“To recover our power, we must recover our memory.”
- Sylvia Federici, Re-enchanting the World (2019) (4)
The last room presents a spiral of coins: nearly 200 ceramic pieces arranged like museum artifacts, each bearing goddess-like figures and gestures of labor. This installation is inspired by ancient goddesses such as Kybele, Artemis, and Ishtar, whose mythologies crossed and fused across the geographies of Anatolia and Mesopotamia, evoking a lineage of matriarchal strength, fertility, and ritual. As the spiral expands, the coins gradually enlarge, transforming into plates that depict communal scenes, featuring women cooking, cleaning, dancing, gathering for altın günü, and embracing trees. Each form is a speculative currency of care, an imagined alternative to patriarchal economies.
The works nods to multiple symbolic traditions. It echoes the Turkish Republic gold coin, a ubiquitous token of social and economic exchange, often gifted in acts of celebration among women. It also evokes the solemnity of East Asian ghost money traditions, in which paper bills are burned to accompany the dead into the afterlife. But here, the offering is not made to emperors or patriarchs. These coins are dedicated to the unrecognized, the underpaid, the mythologized, those whose labor shaped empires and yet rarely minted one.
Uras grounds this speculative economy in a real historical artifact: a 50 kuruş coin issued in Turkey in 1971, the first and only coin of the Republic to feature a woman. The figure, depicted in a traditional headscarf, is widely understood as the “Anatolian Bride,” a symbolic representation of rural womanhood. She is neither a nationalist icon nor a divine ideal, but a woman of the people. Uras reclaims and expands this lineage: What if our economies were built not on conquest, but on continuity? Not on patriarchal power, but on matriarchal reciprocity?
Spirals recur throughout the exhibition, drawn from prehistoric design and loaded with symbolism: cyclical time, rebirth, feminine temporality. The ouroboros, the snake that eats itself, is quietly embedded in this cosmology, signaling regeneration. Alongside it, the crescent moon and sun appear, timekeepers of menstrual cycles, planting seasons, and cosmic rhythms beyond the reach of capital. Uras proposes a different economic order, one aligned with bodily, planetary, and ancestral time.
This is not merely a commemorative gesture. It is a counter-history. Elif Uras does not monumentalize through scale or spectacle, but through the smallest units of care; a coin, a plate, a broom, a gold-laced gesture. These are her tools of resistance. With them, she builds a new kind of archive, one where labor is honored, solidarity is materialized, and history is held, literally and symbolically, in women’s hands.
Elif Uras, Earth on Their Hands, 2025, Exhibition view
Earth on Their Hands can be visited every day except Sundays between 11.00–19.00 until November 8, 2025.
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