Epilog, “Łódź Ghetto”

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​Epilog was an attempt to face this condition. It was neither a historical reconstruction of the Łódź Ghetto nor an effort to draw the tragedy of the Holocaust into a grand narrative. What I sought to address was the human condition under absolute power—such as the state or ideology—where the human body, speech, and memory are erased.

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Installation

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​By layering disparate sensory elements—black light, steel wire, wood, the Bible, and neon—within an enclosed space, I aimed to create a liminal environment in which viewers could no longer clearly locate their own bodies. Rather than reproducing a specific historical site, the installation functioned as a device that sensorially revealed how oppression, silence, and fear impose a particular temporality upon human beings.

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Performance

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​The space was divided by steel wires, forming two prison-like enclosed areas with a narrow passage between them. Electric current was run through the wires, and during the opening performance, metal objects came into contact with the wires, producing sparks and bursts of light.

This staged an event of body–space–electricity–danger–unspoken energy. It was a sensory experiment in which viewers were confronted with the hazardous voltage of an oppressive space, drawn into an experience that symbolized control and surveillance, confinement and isolation, threat and intimidation. The passage became a boundary that was difficult—or forbidden—to cross.

Though thin, the countless steel wires segmented the space into a single, highly charged structure. It was ambiguous who was trapped inside and who was observing. Dark, bluish, cold, and melancholic, the space evoked unease—not a site of quiet remembrance, but a dangerous zone holding a voltage that could erupt at any moment.

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Performance as a Temporal Epilogue

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​This performance functioned as a temporal epilogue. The moment electricity flowed, the installation transformed into a site where pressure, control, danger, and silence converged. The performance became a device that revealed how the space itself operates—allowing viewers to experience that historical violence is not concluded, but continues to repeat within the sensory present.

Within the pressure of dark blue black light and a space charged with cold, melancholy, and anxiety, I staged what might be called an “extreme performance within restraint.” Through a body that dreams of repentance, prayer, and flight, the work unfolded as something akin to a ritual—an act in which a human body, in darkness, connects itself to the residual fragments of the world.

​Epilog, “Łódź Ghetto”

The essence of this work does not reside in a static object, but in its transformation into a temporal event—one in which darkness, voltage, air, body, movement, sparks, and silence momentarily converge. Rather than representing memory or history, the work proposes the conditions under which they become operative as present events.

This work is not an object but an event. Through the artist’s body as a performative medium, and the audience’s body as a co-producer of the event, Epilog, “Łódź Ghetto” activates history within the present tense.