2025 · Video art

Silence in Two Rooms

The project grows out of watching my grandmother live with Alzheimer’s — the first time I encountered otherness tied to a mental condition, a confrontation with the Other. Conversation with her became a site of that otherness. Opaque, unreadable affects broke through the surface of her psyche, and a familiar person became unrecognisable. Her responses to the world turned unpredictable; ordinary domestic contact took unexpected forms. The ethics Emmanuel Levinas describes in relation to the Other becomes the central problem: the duty to take responsibility for this Other without trying to master them, or to project one’s own subjective “I” onto them. How do you remain responsible for someone whose identity is falling into disconnected fragments? Video art “Silence in Two Rooms” At the centre of the work is the Face as a philosophical and visual construct. For Levinas, the encounter with the Face of the Other is a fundamental ethical event. The Face is not a portrait but “a summons addressed to me. It demands, it waits; one must answer.” In the video, archival footage of my smiling grandmother is projected onto the artist’s face. The gesture makes the “encounter with the Face” visible — the moment when the Other appears not as an image but as an ethical call to responsibility. Overlaying the closest and the most unreachable — a living memory on a living face — enacts the paradox of relation: the radical proximity of duty and the irreducible distance of otherness. The work asks how we meet someone whose subjectivity we can no longer share, yet whose silent summons continues to sound within us.