Prayers is dedicated to my mother, who passed away during my artist residency. Her absence reoriented my sense of reality and pushed me into a deeply personal exploration of identity, grief and redemption. It addresses my concerns about reviving what has been abandoned through the repetition of vocals and materials as a meditative ritual.
At the center of the installation is harmonic glossolalia—speaking in tongues, an unknown language to the speaker, associated with Pentecostal traditions—which emerged involuntarily as form of survival during my prolonged illness. It operates as a sonic response to grief, echoing Cathy Caruth’s notion of the impossibility of full articulation, exploring the thresholds between faith and doubt, grief and renewal. Prayers sits at a fragile opening where voice asserts itself after the breakdown of meaning, positioning the voice as a medium of transcendence. The video installation Prayers weaves my harmonic glossolalia with footage of my mother in the ICU and documentation of my wire-weaving process, reflecting my wish for her soul to find the path. Here, voice functions not as explanation but as an embodied response to grief when conventional language fails.
Three site-specific sculptural installations extend this sonic inquiry into physical forms. Mediators, initiated after my mother’s passing and still unfinished, forces me to contemplate the tension between presence and absence. Repetitive wire weaving becomes a labor of searching—tracing someone who is no longer here yet refuses to vanish. Spatially, the porous structure holds a duality: absence that feels present, presence that feels like a whisper. Mediators engages Nicholas of Cusa’s notion of “unknowing,” where understanding emerges not from grasping meaning but from surrendering to the limits of comprehension. This framework connects the series to my harmonic glossolalia practice, which similarly navigates the liminal space between articulation and silence. Resurrection features hundreds of small crosses—made by hand-weaving metal wire onto discarded branches—into a single large cross placed on the floor, allowing viewers to take one with them. Revival consists of around a thousand water bottles gathered over ten years. Like my mother, who collected bottles for reuse, I cut, layer, and weave them one over another as an act of attention and care.
Placing woven metal sculptures alongside video and vocal work—each grounded in repetition—I establish a dialogue between the tactile and the temporal. The video, with its glossolalia and fragmented narratives, offers an ephemeral, performative element that contrasts with the permanence of the sculptures. Together, they reflect memory’s duality : its fleeting nature, lasting in consequence, creating an acoustic field that invites contemplation.
My project Prayers seeks to embrace both failure and vulnerability as integral parts of the creative process, serving as a testament to my ongoing battle between what I aspire to achieve and what reality presents. Weaving sorrow and longing intertwined with my spiritual practice, my work inquires into the human condition and salvation. The war is within, with no shortcuts where the true meaning of surrender is understood only when fully spent. In this surrender, I find peace that even in my brokenness, I am not forsaken.
