What does it mean to love? Serving and loving are inseparably connected with each other. Love that does not act is dead or differently expressed: Love always wants to move something, act upon something! Love is not so much an emotion but more a decision to get active and change something for the better. That only, and nothing else will cause the breaking free from the curse of the destructive human behavior towards each other. Love does not allow for categorical thinking, does not put anyone in a box, but frees the other, to become as they were intended to be. The symbol of the “washing of the feet” is an image of compassion back then as well as today. Not only does this gesture demonstrates love but also signifies commitment toward your fellow man.
The central video is based on this well-known motif in western iconography and visual culture - “The Washing of the feet” scene from the Gospel. The videos on the side wings reflect on the value of life and death. These are the scenes from "Deposition," another very common theme from our visual culture. [The visual, as well as the conceptual motif, is inspired/borrowed from the sculptural ensemble by the Antonio D’Este’s work Deposition (1754-1837). Although in the videos the viewer will see these scenes fractured and fragmented.]
The video on the left side shows three hands, which symbolize life, death, and sadness but it also shows artists own hands. The movements in the video are minimal. The video on the right side mirrors the video on the left. This time the viewer can also see the face of the artists, which is included in the group. Thus she, the artist, becomes part of the iconography, part of the long tradition of western visual history and its rhetoric’s. The contemporary, actual, real face, a face of an artist is inserted into the timeless, iconographic, art historical. It is a poignant, subtle play with the iconography and the themes so well-familiar to us, in which artist is present, as it were, while at the same time her presence reveals how staged and constructed its visual language is. She shows this iconography as part of the cultural code and as every code it is effective, but at the same time it is limiting, framing our perception.
The viewer is engaged in the process and plays an active role. He or she enters into a dialogue with it and completes the circle between the artist, the artwork and themselves.
