Renunciation; A Requiem
Soil, Sumi-e ink, neon poem, canaries, cages, chairs, tables, incense; 60´ L x 35´ W x 25´ H
Renunciation; A Requiem transforms the gallery into a contemplative landscape where perception, metaphor, and sensory experience converge. The floor, blanketed in rich soil, absorbs the footprints of visitors, tracing their passage through a space simultaneously intimate and expansive. Walls are animated with broad, gestural strokes of Sumi-e ink, creating an abstract environment reminiscent of a cave, ruin, or forest shadowed by mystery.
Suspended above, the neon lines of Hafez’s verse—“This narrow cage is not meant for a song bird like me. / My home is an enchanted green, to that garden I shall flee.”—glow from varying heights, only legible when viewed from below. The light from the poem bathes the space in a spectral presence, guiding the visitor through the work’s layered narrative. Nine yellow canaries, each housed in a cage placed atop black chairs and tables, echo the tension between confinement and flight, freedom and circumstance.
The installation unfolds in three movements: the neon poem frames context and reflection; the canaries offer a living metaphor for liberty and constraint; and the gestural Sumi-e environment presents a larger, desolate terrain—a meditation on life’s journey, impermanence, and the illusions that accompany the notion of freedom. Every material is chosen for its tactile and symbolic resonance, creating a delicate interplay between the corporeal and the poetic.
As viewers move through the space, questions emerge organically: What is freedom? Can it exist within the walls that surround us, or beyond them? Is it found in action, awareness, or surrender? Renunciation; A Requiem invites a contemplative pause, situating the observer in a threshold between the relative and the absolute, the visible and the unseen, the ephemeral and the eternal.