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Reliquary XX–XXI
Version 3: Thanatos Archive
Since 2009 (2024)
What lends this version its particular power is the layering of deaths. Not only does the artist die – anticipating their end and articulating it in the work – but the artwork itself dies as well: fragmented, transferred, anonymized. It is preserved in its reliquary cell, but only as a trace, a posthumous residue of form. The empty niches of the twenty-first century become anxious cavities of future loss: we do not yet know which works will fill these spaces, but the architecture of death is already prepared for them. Thanatos Archive thus becomes not merely a chronicle of finitude, but its mise-en-scène – a multiple, stratified death, in which the artist’s vanishing, the anticipation of it, and the posthumous fading of their work are all woven into a single system of radical reminder. This may be the most literal and unflinching manifesto of the entire series: a work wholly and completely devoted to memento mori.
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