HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS OF HISTORY DESTROYED, EFFICIENTLY

Solo exhibition presented by MAMA at 309 Bethnal Green Rd, London, UK, 2025

Photos courtesty of MAMA and Tom Carter

Press release (written by Sarah Green, founder of MAMA):

In this exhibition, Usadi presents a series of ceramics and drawings that imagine a future in which marine life has vanished—reconstructed “sea shells” from a world that has forgotten how to build them. These ghostly forms mourn what has been lost and question how we remember what can no longer exist.

Technological progress has brought both innovation and devastation. Ocean acidification, a by-product of industrial advancement, dissolves the very materials that once sustained marine life. Usadi’s ceramics appear as though they might have been 3D-printed: precise, seamless and algorithmic. Their construction borrows from the complex patterns that molluscs use in shell-building, yet they lack organic character and colour. They are artefacts of a post-natural world; echoes of life reimagined through the logic of machines.

In one of the sculptures, an exhaust pipe is incorporated, a potent reminder of our dependence on fossil fuels. The material, once used to expel the by-products of combustion, symbolically connects to oil and exhaust as residues of ancient marine life transformed over millennia into the energy sources that now threaten their descendants. This element underscores the cyclical entanglement between life, death, and extraction, linking the geological past to a technologically saturated present.

Each work takes its title from the genus of the shell that inspired it. In biological taxonomy, a genus groups closely related species, binding them within a shared lineage. Usadi overlays this system with the language of computation, referencing ASCII (the American Standard Code for Information Interchange), a character-encoding standard that translates letters, numbers and symbols into binary form for digital communication. These hybrid titles—half biological, half technological—expose the uneasy intersection between natural history and machine logic.

Drawing from the lineage of environmental art, Usadi’s practice mourns ecological loss while reimagining the relationship between technological progress and the living world. She questions whether our contemporary languages—technological, scientific, or artistic—can still speak meaningfully about the living world at a moment when language itself seems to fail to capture the ruptures of our time. Her work acts as both elegy and speculation, inviting reflection on continuity, transformation, and the shifting landscape through which we record and relate to the natural world.