TRAGEDY (2024)

Shaped as an immersive performance exhibition, Tragedy is an all-consuming space draped entirely in black, where two miserable fictional characters enact a slow, endlessly looping nightmare. This dreamscape takes the shape of an entrapment, a labyrinth without walls, a site where Western cultural tropes from the baroque until now take shape as disordered compulsions: lap dances, star-crossed lovers, cowboy fantasies, dying swans, court des ballets, still lives, and Hollywood sex. Tragedy is a non-emotional burial ground for an undying history—a form of time in decay.

In 2019, artist and theorist Alina Popa wrote in one of her final essays, “The body is real, but what we think about it is fiction.” While alluding to the “real” as the material properties of the body, such as flesh, bones, blood, skin, etc. Popa also points to the body as a disciplined container where complex fictional realities are cultivated until they penetrate our skin and stick to our flesh as something true. Drawing on an expanded interpretation of Popa’s 2019 quote, Tragedy explores the body and its surroundings as a complex network of destructive Western fictions where all of us become violent agents of a dying world.