Essays

Contact Without Convergence: Weapons (2025)

Hold the door for questions; let answers take their breath

At 2:17 a.m., seventeen pupils walk out and are simply gone. The town’s response—teachers, parents, police—unfolds by relay, scenes fracturing and returning from new vantage points until coherence itself becomes suspect. Justin, the teacher, is renamed before she can speak; Archer grieves the world that vanished with his son; a cartographer flattens the village into lines and numbers. The film holds us in a suspended “not yet”, where sentences collapse into breath and endurance is the only skill. It resists the hunt for a culprit, shifting the question from who did what to who bears what. Even the late revelation refuses to close the wound: endings arrive as parallel lines, contact without convergence. What remains is the teacher’s role—not to deliver answers, but to keep open the room where questions live.

Harvest (2024) review

Hesitation at the Boundary

Set in a small Scottish hamlet, Harvest watches Walter hover between belonging and remove as a cartographer’s map and a laird’s rule press the village flat. Fire acts as both event and line, cutting borders between “us” and “them”. Shot at hand-height, with sound sometimes leading image, the film sidesteps plot for textures—skin, grass, breath—and asks what names and images do to places, and whether hesitation can be a form of care.

The Infinite Body

The Meaning of the Body in Bruce Nauman’s MAPPING THE STUDIO II

This paper examines Bruce Nauman’s moving image installations in relation to the reconfigured boundaries of public and private space in the post-pandemic era. Beginning from the “New Normal” of domestic spaces becoming hybrid work and social zones, it situates Nauman’s works—such as Audio-Video Underground Chamber (1972–74) and Mapping the Studio II (2001)—as early inquiries into the doubling of physical and mediated space. Central is the notion of negative space: not absence, but an active aesthetic structure where the artist’s body is both invisible and formative. By turning the empty studio into a form of self-portraiture, Nauman reframes identity and subjectivity as performative events spanning studio, screen, and gallery. His installations anticipate today’s hybrid condition, offering negative space as a conceptual tool for rethinking embodiment and subjectivity between physical and virtual worlds.

Desired Desires

Babies Cry to Fulfil Their Basic Needs