nika sandler - a history of teeth
What remains when the voice is gone?
When flesh dissolves and the soft tissue that once expressed desire, pain and joy recedes into dust? Teeth endure.
These fragments of bone-like matter outlast the body’s most vulnerable parts, preserving evidence of our existence long after breath has ceased. A History of Teeth is an exploration of this persistence, an attempt to read the silent, enduring language of enamel and dentin as both record and relic.
Through macro photography and forensic observation, this work looks closely at teeth not as functional tools, but as artefacts that bear witness. Every chip, stain and fissure speaks of a life lived, appetites satisfied and stress clenched in the jaw.
Teeth are biological archives, encoding a fragmented history of identity, trauma and desire.
They survive where voice fails, their permanence a haunting contrast to our impermanence.
But to consider teeth solely through a human lens is limiting. In A History of Teeth, Nika Sandler attempt to look beyond the anthropocentric gaze. By incorporating images of plaque bacteria and microbial colonies, she invites the viewer to consider the invisible ecosystems that inhabit and transform our mouths. These microscopic lives, unseen yet omnipresent, shape us from within, carving their own histories onto the surfaces we imagine as ours alone.
Technology, too, becomes a tool for re-seeing. Through experiments with machine vision, Nika explores how artificial systems interpret and abstract what we consider intimately human. The machine’s eye distorts, reorders and reveals. In these images, teeth become unmoored from their biological origins, transformed into strange topographies, at once familiar and alien.
A History of Teeth is not merely about what is seen, but how we see. It asks: what can teeth tell us about ourselves, about the bodies we inhabit and the systems, organic and synthetic, that shape our understanding of them?
What remains when all else is gone?
post and text by Vincent Urbani