§ we all speak at once
In 2006, I exhibited a work titled ‘Portable Memorial’, which was a book of souls for the internet age. It served as a record of deaths, broken dreams, failed enterprises, and the shifting currents of life online. The book listed 209,444 lapsed domain names from the period 16 May 2000 to 8 May 2001. Viewers were invited to highlight individual names as acts of remembrance.
When I began to create scrolls, I revisited the idea of text-based memorials. My aim was to evoke complex narratives through simple typographic means. The complexity is provided by generative/computational processes. I often use custom code and graphic software to redraw words repeatedly in layered compositions, producing dense asemic texts.
Applying this technique to another list of names felt like a meaningful act. I chose a list of 5,000 Holocaust victims, published by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (www.ushmm.org), intended for name-reading memorial events. Each name is accompanied by either a country of origin or a known site of their death. In this work, the site names are redacted with black ink, allowing the memorial to communicate with minimal contextual framing.
The long, digitally printed scroll currently displayed in the gallery remains a work in progress for me. Each version I’ve created is both a memorial reading and a performance of the names. A copy of the original USHMM document is available for visitors to view the original list and information.
Exhibition history >>
08.09.2025 to 27.09.2025
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In a Land Gallery [Hebden Bridge, UK]
