Andra Ursuţa's Archaeological Futurism at DESTE Hydra
Andra Ursuţa (Millennial, Romanian-US-American) takes over a former slaughterhouse to play around with archaeological narratives. Is Ancient Greece her Roman Empire?
POV: You’re The Piggy Going To The Market
Picture this: Cliffs and deep blue water extending to the mainland shore. Golden hour light. Jeff Koon’s (Baby Boomer, US-American) Apollo (2022), a humanized spinning sun, guiding the way. I noticed a simple wooden sign in Greek and English indicating the direction to the DESTE Foundation Project Space. One word stuck with me: Slaughterhouse.
Little did I know how crowded it would be when we went to the opening. We stood in a long ass line as if we were queueing for a rollercoaster ride or a new food place. I didn’t know what to expect; I hadn’t seen any visuals of the place beforehand. So as the line moved slowly, I started to recognize the building in the distance: Grey, rough stone walls, surprisingly compact. How was it supposed to fit this horde of people trying to get a glimpse of the exhibition?
Spoiler alert: It didn’t. It was really just two adjacent rooms, overflowing with curious folks and their arms raised to take pictures — if they can’t see the art with their eyes, they can with their phones. The closer we got to the entrance, the pushier the crowd got and the stronger the sense of unease grew. The moving sunrays of Jeff’s solemn sun suddenly looked like indifferent, sharp blades. Upon seeing a black scythe on the wall next to the entrance, I suddenly felt as if we were all cattle, clueless and curious about where our shepherds were bringing us.
Did Somebody Say…Slay?
I quickly gave up on the opening night; I didn’t even make it inside. The next day, I returned with another friend for a fresh look in the morning. During her artist talk the next night, Andra shared that she grew up around slaughterhouses in Romania and that her first word as a toddler was, in fact, meat. I guess ✨slaying✨ is part of the culture💅. Maybe Andra mopped the blood off the floors before opening the show with her Floor Lickers (2013), two mops with silicone casts of animal tongues instead of fibres casually resting against a wall.
With space to breathe and move, I took another look at the haunting scythe from the night before: It’s actually half-scythe and half-bike rack, part bronze and part leather. And if there’s something that mythology loves, it’s a hybrid creature, right?
Andra’s works are always an unexpected mix of objects she collected over the years and which she merges into one material, usually cast glass. For this exhibition, she worked with bronze for the first time. At the artist talk, she shared her fascination with ancient Greek bronze-making practices: artisans often reused body parts from old figures for new ones, making the creation process a mix-and-match of limbs. The Berlin Foundry Cup from the 5th Century BCE offers insight into what that looked like.
As I peeked inside the main room, I saw Half-Drunk Mummy (2024), a glass figure elevated on a simple grey brick pedestal. Another hybrid creature, this time part human and part object: Slim-waisted on ozempic, folds suggesting a dress, crunched bottles for arms, and something else I couldn’t recognize replaced the head. The sunlight brought out its radiant color gradients from within, making the texture milky in the upper part and jelly-like in the lower. The pose reminded me of a caryatid, a female sculpture that architecturally supports a structure. The most famous ones are the caryatids of the Athenian Acropolis. Most historical examples lack arms, so I guess it’s only fitting that Andra filled the blank spots with her own additions.
Adjacent, another version takes up space. But this one is translucent white except for a cap closing the right bottle arm. Both works are alcohol containers. I kid you not. In the context of this exhibition, that makes totally sense, given that ancient vessels used to have all sorts of bizarre shapes. My problem is that this applies to all her glass works, which to me is nothing but a random gimmick. She did explain this bit in her talk saying something about people using alcohol to cope with their lost dreams and aspirations…? Idk, but I approve it in this context.
The white version feels much more “sober” (haha) compared to the colorful one. It feels more “correct” to the pop cultural imagination of what Antiquity looked like. And that’s where Andra’s work chimes in.
This Curious Thing We Call History…
If you limit this show to an homage to Greek sculpture or a contemporary take on Antiquity, it’s easy to dismiss it as nostalgic. This show is rather quite the opposite. Nostalgia idealizes memories, the mind rarely recollects the past as it was — let’s be real, our mind never remembers anything the way something was. Instead, it selects certain memories and embellishes them to fit an aesthetic or emotional idea, resulting in the most ideal retelling of what one remembers. None of that is the actual past.
Both history books and pop culture tend to look at past societies and cultures with nostalgia and fear. It’s seductive to play with the fantasy that certain things just were better in the past, that life was simpler or more joyful. There’s also a sense of loss in the idea that “we” would be much “better off” if we had access to the knowledge of the past. If only we knew the recipe for Roman self-healing concrete or what books the Library of Alexandria contained.
Simultaneously, there’s haunting imagery of brutality and violence that doesn’t fit a self-proclaimed “Modern” society. The present rejects those past cultures as backward and primitive, unwilling to acknowledge that this very same brutality and violence exist today as well. Its shape is just different. In her book Cannibal Culture (1996), Anthropologist Deborah Root writes about the clash of Spaniards and Aztecs. The Spaniards were in denial about how the Aztecs were their imperial equals because they couldn’t handle their explicit violence, whereas European violence somehow appeared more “subtle”:
Because most Spaniards who invaded Mexico in the sixteenth century refused to look squarely at the implications of power, they could not tolerate the explicitness of the Méxica state's organization of violence and mass death. For example, in Tenochtitlan prisoners of war were sent to the sacrificial pyramids, while in Paris in the same years thousands were slaughtered in the streets in the Saint Bartholomew's Day massacre. The European state was—and is—as much a cannibal as the Aztec, but mass death in Europe tends to be classified as an accidental phenomenon rather than as something intrinsic to the functioning of the system. Despite example after example of Western atrocities, it is always someone else who is the cruel and pitiless barbarian. — Cannibal Culture, p. 7
Both fear and nostalgia are the results of fantasy. And even though historians aspire to reconstruct the past as truthfully and as objectively as possible, it’s hard to shake off one’s own presumptions and worldviews entirely. An example is the apparently mindboggling discovery that queer relationships are not an invention of the 21st century but existed in various cultures and contexts millennia ago. Even the hardest evidence of same-sex relationships would be framed as merely “deep friendships”. Returning to Andra’s mention of Ancient Greek bronze assembly, she stated that historians misinterpreted the visual information as a cannibal feast. I’m still looking for the exact object and interpretation she referred to.
Another curious example is the persistent belief that statues and temples in Ancient Greece were blank, even though scholars have been offering evidence that they were colorfully painted for quite a while now. This myth is so stubborn because it’s not about visuals and taste as much as it is about ideology. The idea of white marble communicated “ethnical” purity and racial whiteness, legitimizing those concepts in falsely constructed narratives of Antiquity. Material whiteness was and is equated to the racial ideology of whiteness. To accept the colorfulness of Ancient Greece is to recognize the fallacy of one’s own ideology. Andra’s white and colorful glass sculptures appear in this context as an interpretation of what the past looked like, rather than its reflection.
Ultimately, history is only an approximation to the past, never its 1:1 reconstruction. That might be a reason to give up on historical accuracy altogether, to throw it overboard, given that it’s impossible to get it right anyway. If history is what you make it or what the victors write, why even bother about the truth? I’d say that getting as close as possible to the past is like calculating the circumference of a circle. It’s close to impossible to get it 100% right, but one can get close enough to work with it. Omg did I just use a math metaphor?! This is a canon event.
If people in the past could hear what assumptions we make about them, they’d probably turn in their graves, so Andra gives space to this absurdity: Andra arranged smaller works on a scaffolding structure like those on archaeological sites. Her bronze Doric Disorder (2025) is kinda shaped like the inside of a shield. Snakes, recalling the myth of Medusa, crawl all over it. Their nest is perhaps the attached bike helmet. What will people think of this object in the future? What assumptions will they make? And how will they differ from mine?
And this is the beauty of Andra’s work: It’s not about enlarging an idea of the past and marinating in nostalgia. Instead, her work showcases awareness of how there is no way people can create a record of themselves that will be correctly interpreted in the future. Translation will always get lost in time. People of the coming centuries and millennia (assuming there will be any) will inevitably make up stuff about our lives the way we make up stuff about the past, no matter how hard we try to be accurate. Andra shows how fictionalized history ultimately is.
Andra Ursuţa: Apocalypse Now And Then, until October 31, 2025, at DESTE Foundation, Hydra.
DESTE FOUNDATION — Project Space Slaughterhouse
Epar.Od. Mandrakiou-Molou
180 40 Hydra
Website
Instagram: @destefoundation
Thank you! I hope you enjoyed this review. If you did, please leave me a like and share with a friend!
See you soon!!!
Jennifer
The Gen Z Art Critic