Projects

A Statement “Fragile”

Human activities in the critical zone of our existence have transformed our planet’s climate and ecosystem, which now amplify the pandemic’s troubling effects and consequences, indicating how fragile and vulnerable life on Earth is.

When obligated to work from my studio or home, I focused on the relationships between time and acceleration, thereby slowing down through experimental drawing. Falling back on charcoal, one of the earliest elementary tools’ humans used to create artwork, I re-engage with a mysterious, dark, and dusty material that connects with my work’s infrastructure forming multilayered condensed environments of accumulation, disintegration, and erasure. Still used to live in a fast-moving world of mobility, instant gratification, and short memory, the experience of working in the pandemic’s isolation, is a reminder to attend to the quality of time, taking and making time.

Even though the drawing process indicates a fast past paced mark-making in the video presentation, each drawing demanded about one hour of work. I was fascinated by the idea to produce a short video reducing the composition to the utmost fluidity of time, space, and image flow motivated by Sting’s song & “Fragile”.

With up to three models who moved, walked, stretched, and positioned in my studio, I focused on experiences of enclosed spaces, trapped in crowds, stuck in a cramped place, a corner, a door frame, or narrow hallways. Besides, I placed my drawing table either in a tight niche of my studio or a blocked door. While I was drawing the bodies; movements, aspects of fragility centered on one’s sensitivities expressed by turns, shifts in direction, bending, stretching, or walking around another person to avoid contact.

The idea of fragility intersects with the concept of fluidity through mark-making, erasures, smudges, obfuscation, obscuration, overlaps, and crossovers. Once a person is fixed in place, it appears to be wiped out or disintegrated in the next moment. Yet memory, in a moment, stays as a cluster of dust and layers of overwriting. The overall process hints at an endless palimpsest of layers above layers until the viewer realizes the reverse dynamics as traces of our existence in a backward video timeline.

However, my figures turned or twisted from the blank or filled paper my work concludes dissolution and disappearance. One’s memory of existence is at risk: sometimes, I draw with both hands to enhance the clumsiness of mark-making as a form of forgetting and obscuring. Or I draw with my eyes closed to memorize a vivid moment before its erasure or dissolution into the dust of matter.

As for the artistic process, in the beginning, the base is always blank. In the end, there is a wealth of lines. The reversed video allows for a re-interpretation of the origin and ends. The reverse mode that comes slowly to the viewers; attention suggests a cycle of perpetual beginnings and endless ends.

Of importance is the in-between, the engraved layers of time and space. At the beginning of the video, a finished drawing appears, but a blank canvas is visible at the end. No matter how, the end and the beginning are intersecting cycles between the idea of the potential, virtual, or contingency of possibilities we have not lived yet and the work over the creation, actions, or fulfillment of prospects realized in life.

What lies in between beginning and end are innumerable encounters of aliveness. The process of making, the abundance of creativity, the wealth of lines as a comprehensive act of a fulfilled, not just consumed life. “Fragile” is not a memento mori but a matter of aliveness. Each mark-making, every line, with all occasioned obscurities and intertwined lineages, new beginnings, experimental gestures are expressions of aliveness and the acceptance being in that moment, at one point, a thread in a tapestry of being.

Scroll down to the 4th section where you can watch my “Fragile” drawing video production in collaboration with the Musicum Collegium Cologne in Germany.