2018
Archival Inkjet Prints
Various sizes
With surveillance systems and the world wide web, we live under excessive light, always on stage, controlled. We inevitably and willingly overexpose ourselves on social media, leaving no room for curiosity and play. In Carpe Noctem, I am suggesting an opposite approach to life, a celebration of darkness as a territory for discovery and rebirth of self. Meaning “seize the night” in Latin, Carpe Noctem is a call to celebrate the night and suggest living the night as thoroughly as the day. I aim to evoke the viewer's imagination in darkness while making time, place, and identity ambiguous and belonging to all. I see the night as a phase of becoming inspired by the Goddess Nyx. In classical Greek narratives, she, the Night, is a figure of a transition between the day’s reality and the night’s otherworldliness. She is a symbol of fertility and becoming. Inspired by her, I focus on the expanding possibilities of nocturnality.
Taking night walks around different cities and manipulating found portrait images into representations of anonymous people; the series focuses on the night as a never-ending labyrinth and a feminine force. It presents an alternative possibility of existence. As the artist, I am a wanderer, explorer, and healer in the night through image-making. I get lost on the streets of various cities with my camera. I play with the moon. I reach out to the only light source of the primordial night. I invite others to join me to experience this collectively. I jump over the threshold between day and night and invite the viewer to conceive the world within darkness. I imagine the night as a place where one can experience the freedom to be themselves without any sense of belonging to anywhere or anyone.
