Between the Eye and the Soil

Installation · 2025

Between the Eye and the Soil is an immersive installation that places the viewer inside a chamber of surveillance, where seeing is no longer an innocent act but a mechanism of power. Numerical sequences—algorithmic, endless, and unreadable—are projected across walls, stones, and mirrored surfaces. These numbers do not narrate; they classify, calculate, and anticipate. They echo contemporary systems of algorithmic governance whose roots lie in colonial modes of knowledge: to map is to possess, to observe is to dominate, and to render visible is to make governable. The space functions as a contemporary cave—where reality is not encountered directly, but mediated through projections that shape perception while concealing their authority.

Within this space, stone and mirror operate in tension. A fragmented mirrored face resists coherence, dissolving any stable image of the self. Identity appears here not as essence, but as a surface continuously shaped by external observation. In the foreground, large stones embedded with mirrored eyes return the gaze, interrupting its one-directional flow. At the center, smaller stones gather quietly, carrying mirrored eyes as well—an indirect invocation of the stone as an act rather than an object. This gesture recalls the Palestinian Intifada of stones, not as historical illustration but as a living metaphor: the stone redirected toward the machinery of surveillance itself. What is thrown is not force alone, but reflection—an attempt to fracture the gaze that seeks to fix, extract, and control. Between the eye and the soil, the work holds a space where memory, land, and resistance remain unresolved, insisting on opacity as a condition of survival.