In this two-channel video work, I reflect on the feeling of emptiness and futility that defines both personal and collective experience. The work emerged from my ongoing research into the meaninglessness and absurdity of war and the world around us.
On one screen, I document myself performing a familiar routine — getting ready, applying makeup, dressing up — before stepping, fully dressed, into the shower and washing everything away. The act becomes a quiet ritual of repetition and erasure, where purpose dissolves into habit.
The second screen presents an ongoing montage of key global events from the year of my birth to the present: wars, crises, pandemics, and political collapses.
Shown side by side, the two timelines — the personal and the global — unfold in parallel, revealing a shared rhythm of endless repetition and meaninglessness. Together, they create a space of contemplation: a reflection on how everyday gestures and world-defining catastrophes coexist, mirror one another, and ultimately return to the same void.
My idea of absence arose from personal experience — from a sense of lost meaning and deep disillusionment. The naive vision I once had of the life I would lead as an adult was shattered by forces beyond my control.
Is there a meaning when parents abandon their children and trade their love for fleeting pleasures? Is there a meaning when a child is born disabled and spends eleven years in convulsions and paralysis? Is there a meaning when contemporary culture and human relationships are reduced to transactions, making it almost impossible to find someone truly capable of sincere feelings? Is love merely weakness, and therefore meaningless? Is there a meaning in valuing only fame, sex, and money? Is there a meaning when war enters your home, destroys your plans and hopes, and takes lives?
“Art excludes the unnecessary” — Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (1996).
The merging of object and background as a negation of meaning in the object itself, and as an embrace of the all-encompassing emptiness. A canvas layered white upon white, black upon black. A ghostly trace — an object left on a chair, evoking memory and absence.
The world in which we find ourselves offers fewer reasons for hope or color. Oversaturation with content has dulled our senses and built a kind of immunity against communication through art. We have been deprived of the very possibility of expressive protest. Nothing feels new; nothing elicits a genuine response from the viewer. No work of art can now be more dramatic than the reality in which we live every day.
An artist who preserves time gives more than anyone else. Comparable to a black hole that swallows everything — including time — our culture consumes our empathy, taking our attention and time.
I feel what you feel, and you know this. Is that not enough?