I
2023
Audiovisual installation
Repetition is a versatile tool. Kierkegaard argues that “repetition and recollection are the same movement, just in opposite directions”. Semantic satiation is a phenomenon in which a word loses meaning as a consequence of repetition. The “actuality and earnestness of existence” that is repetition pervaded within this phenomenon creates different outcomes when applied to language(s) one speaks and does not.
The work executed correlatively utilize repetition of the word -I- as a unit in different languages. By pursuing semantic satiation, in “I” deconstructed images from the act of repeating are placed on two sides of a passage accompanied by a sound of this repetition (placed in the middle) only to be heard once crossing from one language to another, or perhaps from one direction to another. As meaning disappears so does function, and consequently the concept of “I”, the self, both the signifier and the signified in this case.
It might be noticed that just as there is a physicality to remembering, there is a physicality to forgetting. One remembers, one forgets remembering, one doesn’t remember, one (re)remembers. How does repetition mediate and intervene the severance, the dissonance by settling in the transitional space between languages, words and movements?
Installation view, What Must Be, Is Curated by Joseph Kosuth
© 2025
