Series: My Land (Level 1)

Graphite, charcoal and acrylic on paper.

My work explores how we construct an understanding of a territory from afar. Since 2017, I have been working on a long-term project titled My Land, in which I grant myself an absolute power to create a world according to my rules. This project contains drawings, sculptures and writings that represent maps, artifacts and tales of an imagined territory. This territory does not correspond to any known culture in human history. It has its own systems of logic, language, and metrology that are functional only within themselves. I consider the project as a thought experiment of a phenomenal environment in which the personal experience of any viewer is stripped away. He or she must completely abandon his or her own invalid cultural legacy in order to navigate the environment.

My Land is designed to have four different “entrances”- four starting points to experience the territory. The most common “entrance” is to begin with the keymap [mothermap], which represents the whole territory with the universe around it. According to the map, the territory is stuck between day and night, outside of our perception of time. The map is divided by an 8x8 grid, thus having 64 space units. Each unit then leads to a separate map, which has its own space units, and so on. The project continues to develop according to this procedure. As the project grows, [mothermap] is remade accordingly. I construct the framework of all entrances in this way, making the whole project under infinite revisions and expansion.