SCATTERED STORIES; Silhouettes

2016-2023 For Alan Kurdi.

Scattered Stories; Silhouettes rejects the representation of the body, reconstituting it instead as a structure of traces that emerges at the moment of its withdrawal from space. In this installation, the figure is no longer a depicted entity; it appears as a linear residue, a line of tension that surfaces where continuity is interrupted. The silhouettes, affixed to the wall with shoelaces, occupy an unstable threshold between presence and absence. This threshold is not merely a formal ambiguity, but a spatial manifestation of the subject’s politically suspended condition.

At the center of this transformation is the shoelace, displaced from its everyday function and subjected to a radical redefinition. Ordinarily, it binds the body to the ground and enables movement; here, it becomes fixed to the very moment in which movement is interrupted. It no longer facilitates progression but holds in place the point where movement ceases. In doing so, the shoelace ceases to be a tool and becomes instead a material tension that carries interruption itself. This shift alters not only the ontology of the object, but also that of the body: the body is no longer perceived as a coherent whole, but as a fragmented trace.

The figures that emerge within the installation are derived from ordinary gestures of everyday life: a child at play, a moment of transition, an act of carrying. Yet these gestures do not appear as completed actions; they are rendered as interrupted processes. For this reason, the work does not represent a dramatic moment; rather, it reveals the threshold at which the dramatic has not yet occurred, but has already become inevitable. The catastrophe itself remains unseen, but the structural void it leaves behind permeates the entire surface. The viewer does not encounter an event, but a spatial regime of discontinuity produced by its aftermath.

In this sense, the work does not construct an archive in the conventional sense; instead, it assembles an archive of incomplete movements. Each line bears the trace of a severed trajectory, while both its point of origin and destination are deliberately withheld. Narrative, therefore, never resolves; it is continuously deferred. As the viewer attempts to complete meaning, they are confronted with absence.

The occasional presence of single shoes within the silhouettes marks points where this absence intensifies. Deprived of their potential to exist as a pair, these objects no longer function as elements of balance, but instead signal its irreversible loss. The shoe here is not an instrument of movement, but a residue of its impossibility. The relationship between body and ground has been severed, and this rupture cannot be restored.

The linear language of the installation sustains this condition without dramatization, operating with an almost ascetic restraint. The fragility and thinness of the shoelaces exceed aesthetic choice, becoming a condition of existence. The apparent lightness of the figures does not suggest liberation, but rootlessness. Their attachment to the wall does not imply fixation, but suspension. This suspended state takes on a concrete spatial form, reflecting the uncertainty and precarity to which the subject is exposed within contemporary political conditions.

For this reason, Silhouettes can be read neither as figurative representation nor as an exploration of abstraction. Rather, it positions itself as a practice that traces how the body is historically and politically erased—how it is reduced to a trace. Yet this inquiry does not seek to repair loss; it intensifies and renders it visible. As the viewer attempts to recognize the figures, they are confronted instead with the unrecognizable—because what is presented here is not identity, but the process of its dissolution.

Ultimately, this first phase establishes the fundamental logic of disintegration that unfolds throughout the series. The reduction of the body to a trace marks the initial threshold of a process in which space will dissolve into absence and movement into instability. In this sense, Scattered Stories; Silhouettes does not mark a beginning so much as it fixes a moment of rupture: the point at which continuity breaks, leaving behind only a fragile yet persistent line.