Is it possible to encounter one’s own future? Is it possible to experience a life that has not yet happened, yet remains strangely familiar? PASSENGER begins with just such an encounter. In a train compartment, a young man encounters an older passenger – a storyteller, a storyteller, a figure both seductive and unsettling. With each successive story, another’s biography reveals itself as a possible version of one’s own life. The encounter with the stranger appears as an inevitable catastrophe.

The oil paintings, sculptures, and objects and reliefs made of leather, which comprise the thesis, create a narrative spanning six years of artistic work.

They are not illustrations of individual chapters of the thesis text, but material traces of psychic, affective, and existential processes. The exhibition functions as a passageway in which autobiographical experience is symbolized.

Leather, metal, and the dense paint substance retain traces of gesture, material folds, deformations, and rust. Organic and industrial materials create a psychic archive of experiences, and objects become carriers of memory. The aesthetics of beauty and damage present in these works reveal the complexity of survival mechanisms, compulsive repetition, and attempts to perfect creativity.

PASSENGER is a story about the beginner’s mind, blind survival strategies, the destructive desire for closeness, violence disguised as care, and the process of detoxifying one’s own biography. It is also an attempt to achieve “escape velocity”—the moment when it becomes possible to abandon old trajectories and develop new ways of being. It leaves the viewer wondering whether it is possible to learn to live as if one had received one’s life a second time.