Zugzwang (from the German Zug, “move,” and Zwang, “compulsion”) describes a situation in chess—and in life—where any move is worse than none. It is a paradox of agency: one is compelled to act, even though every option only deepens the loss.

Games is an installation project that unfolds as a mise-en-scène of contemporary dread, filtered through the familiar grammars of play. It reflects on the current geopolitical climate—a world increasingly structured by the logic of games, yet haunted by the absence of true exits.

Reassembling and inverting tropes and symbols drawn from popular culture and the banalities of mass media discourse, the installation becomes a living metaphor for a reality at once absurd and tragic. Symbols of strategy and control appear hollowed out, emptied of agency, looping back on themselves like recursive algorithms.

At its core lies a question both pressing and spectral: Has Zugzwang become our Zeitgeist?

By evoking Hegel’s notion of the Zeitgeist—the “spirit of the age”—the work gestures toward a broader philosophical crisis. For Hegel, the Zeitgeist is not merely the ambient mood of an epoch, but the dialectical engine that drives history forward—the invisible force through which the Absolute unfolds in time. But what if that spirit has now mutated into a logic of entrapment, where movement becomes not a sign of freedom, but of futility?

In such a world, Zugzwang is no longer just a tactical term—it becomes the architecture of the everyday, the atmosphere of the now.