THE YELLOW BOOK
It is not true that modern man is a mind that has conquered fear. Don’t believe that! Fear exists: fear of the outside world, fear of fate, of death, of the unknown, of nothingness, of emptiness.
It is not true that the artist is a hero and conqueror, fearless as the conventional legend tells us. Believe me, he is a poor man and helpless in his share, for he has chosen to face fear. … It is from awareness that fear is born.
Images here carry a double charge: they show, and they withhold. The work resides in this tension. The impulse to frame fear—to delineate its outlines—leads to visual languages that blur the borders between threat and entertainment, internal and external pressure.
The practice of play—far removed from simple amusement—takes on a deeper significance here, acting as an intrinsic force within the human condition. As Johan Huizinga suggests, play is not a superficial distraction but a foundational act, a dynamic force that shapes
cultural and social structures. It becomes a medium for profound transformation, enabling a reimagining of both the individual and the collective experience.
Early references to childhood dissolve into something more elemental: a pre-discursive state, unresolved and instinctual, unmediated by distance or reflection. Fiction becomes not an escape, but a method—an oblique strategy for confronting what resists articulation where staging and symbolism carry a charge of reality more potent than any unmediated depiction. This uneasy oscillation between the real and the constructed echoes the logic of dreams and trauma, where time folds in on itself, and symbols operate in place of events.
The sculptural and photographic gestures within the work trace this same logic. Fragmentation, repetition, dislocation—these are not merely formal tools, but ways of thinking in such states.
Fear is not treated as origin but as reaction: a current capable of generating rupture, withdrawal, violence, or dissociation. Photography—traditionally associated with clarity—is here repurposed to dwell within that opacity, and to re-enact memories without narrative closure, like in the so called “Theatre Of Death” of Tadeusz Kantor, where elderly actors sit beside effigies of their younger selves in dilapidated classroom, staging what can no longer be directly accessed and in doing so, summoning identity itself.
The absence of narrative in such process is intentional. As also seen in Rithy Panh’s “The Missing Picture”, it is precisely where images fail—or never existed—that another kind of visibility can emerge.
We are, as Susan Sontag notes, spectators of violence—conditioned to observe from a distance, made passive in our exposure. In such moments, we risk becoming childlike—not in innocence, but in helpless proximity to spectacle. Yet within that rawness lies a potential: not to understand history, but to feel again, to perceive differently.
It is here that the presence of the viewer becomes crucial, invited, even challenged, to confront the split between spectacle and reality.
In this suspended space, the work opens toward the archetypal, not as metaphor but as threshold—offering the viewer not resolution but a space in which to recognize shadow, and perhaps, to begin the slow work of response, to light.
SOUND INSTALLATION
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It is not true that modern man is a mind that has conquered fear. Don’t believe that! Fear exists: fear of the outside world, fear of fate, of death, of the unknown, of nothingness, of emptiness.
It is not true that the artist is a hero and conqueror, fearless as the conventional legend tells us. Believe me, he is a poor man and helpless in his share, for he has chosen to face fear. … It is from awareness that fear is born.
“A Little Manifesto” (Tadeusz Kantor, Kraków, March 1978)
The Yellow Book unfolds within a suspended space—a transformed room that becomes a stage for transformation. Here, perception unravels, and memory begins to take shape. The room does not attempt to reconstruct a past, but rather opens a space for psychic excavation, where interior states recalibrate the visible. Here, photography does not act as capture or record, but becomes a threshold medium—a process through which documentation dissolves into ritual, and the image becomes an unstable negotiation between form, fear, and fiction.Images here carry a double charge: they show, and they withhold. The work resides in this tension. The impulse to frame fear—to delineate its outlines—leads to visual languages that blur the borders between threat and entertainment, internal and external pressure.
The practice of play—far removed from simple amusement—takes on a deeper significance here, acting as an intrinsic force within the human condition. As Johan Huizinga suggests, play is not a superficial distraction but a foundational act, a dynamic force that shapes
cultural and social structures. It becomes a medium for profound transformation, enabling a reimagining of both the individual and the collective experience.
Early references to childhood dissolve into something more elemental: a pre-discursive state, unresolved and instinctual, unmediated by distance or reflection. Fiction becomes not an escape, but a method—an oblique strategy for confronting what resists articulation where staging and symbolism carry a charge of reality more potent than any unmediated depiction. This uneasy oscillation between the real and the constructed echoes the logic of dreams and trauma, where time folds in on itself, and symbols operate in place of events.
The sculptural and photographic gestures within the work trace this same logic. Fragmentation, repetition, dislocation—these are not merely formal tools, but ways of thinking in such states.
Fear is not treated as origin but as reaction: a current capable of generating rupture, withdrawal, violence, or dissociation. Photography—traditionally associated with clarity—is here repurposed to dwell within that opacity, and to re-enact memories without narrative closure, like in the so called “Theatre Of Death” of Tadeusz Kantor, where elderly actors sit beside effigies of their younger selves in dilapidated classroom, staging what can no longer be directly accessed and in doing so, summoning identity itself.
The absence of narrative in such process is intentional. As also seen in Rithy Panh’s “The Missing Picture”, it is precisely where images fail—or never existed—that another kind of visibility can emerge.
We are, as Susan Sontag notes, spectators of violence—conditioned to observe from a distance, made passive in our exposure. In such moments, we risk becoming childlike—not in innocence, but in helpless proximity to spectacle. Yet within that rawness lies a potential: not to understand history, but to feel again, to perceive differently.
It is here that the presence of the viewer becomes crucial, invited, even challenged, to confront the split between spectacle and reality.
In this suspended space, the work opens toward the archetypal, not as metaphor but as threshold—offering the viewer not resolution but a space in which to recognize shadow, and perhaps, to begin the slow work of response, to light.
SOUND INSTALLATION
