Shifting the Staircase: An Iteration Through Oscar Niemeyer’s Lines

Sergen Şehitoğlu’s new series of sculptures operates at the intersection of architecture and sculpture, offering a structural analysis that unsettles conventional notions of form, movement, and function. The architectural works of Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer—and in particular his iconic staircase forms—provide the backbone of the series. Rather than treating Niemeyer’s staircases as iconographic references, however, Şehitoğlu approaches them as readymade structures subjected to a set of procedural instructions. Removed from their familiar architectural contexts, these forms are transformed into slides, losing their original function and re-emerging as forms of suspended potential.

Three polished metal spheres rest on each slide. They are not merely aesthetic elements, but representations of movement, acceleration, and time. Yet the spheres remain motionless. Faced with them, the viewer instinctively anticipates: “they are about to slide.” But this expectation is never fulfilled. Şehitoğlu’s sculptures thus become more than objects; they embody the frustration of a kinetic expectation that remains permanently unresolved.

The conceptual tension of the works crystallises in a single question:

“What does the form of movement become in the absence of movement?”

While Oscar Niemeyer’s architecture challenged the aesthetic language of modernism through curves and gestures, Şehitoğlu freezes that gesture, producing a kind of negative motion. A staircase implies ascent; a slide implies descent. Yet in these sculptures there is neither ascent nor descent. What remains is simply the line, suspended in place. Within Şehitoğlu’s practice, this line points simultaneously to the form of time and to the timelessness of form.

In this sense, the project is not a homage to Niemeyer’s legacy, but rather an intersection of art and mathematics through which his understanding of form is systematically analysed. Şehitoğlu does more than reinterpret architecture; he uses geometric formalism to question notions of function, movement, expectation, and play.

The series focuses less on architecture’s structural capacity than on the potential of its lines; less on the mass of sculpture than on its capacity to be translated. While Şehitoğlu articulates aesthetics through a mathematical language, he fixes play within a systematic structure. This paradoxical coexistence gives the series both its poetic and conceptual tension.

This transformation is not merely a translation of form. It is also a physical manifestation of “translation / iteration,” a concept central to Şehitoğlu’s practice. Present in earlier works—including They Were Not Going to Meet – Translation Series and his mathematically driven On Function—the concept examines the structural transformation an object undergoes as it is transferred from one context into another. Here, the staircases cease to function as architectural elements and instead become inputs within a systematic, iterative process.

Niemeyer’s staircases depart from the rigid right-angled geometries of modernist thought through their fluid, curving forms, seemingly defying gravity. Şehitoğlu treats these forms as closed systems and intervenes in them algorithmically. Each sculpture behaves as a sculptural and playful derivative of an architectural element:

The forms begin with architecture, are translated into the language of sculpture, and ultimately find their place within the metaphor of the slide—an object associated with childhood, play, and imagination.