Portraits of Anxiety

Portraits of Anxiety situates four performers within the four fundamental elements—wind, earth, fire and water—to stage anxiety as a condition that is both intensely personal and deeply primal. Over an eight‑minute cycle, each portrait moves from calm through gradual escalation to a point of crisis and back to a provisional “calm,” enacting the looping temporality of anxious experience rather than a simple arc of breakdown and recovery. By binding each body to a specific element, the work proposes anxiety not only as a psychological state but as a fundamental aspect of existence, shaped by and inseparable from the environments we inhabit.

Through the interplay of video and layers of reflective sheet glass, each projection dissolves from an image into an immersive, ganzfeld‑like atmospheric environment, suggesting that anxiety is not contained within the individual but permeates our collective awareness. Viewers see their own reflections merging with those of the performers in a refractive spatial dialogue, making visible the way anxiety saturates contemporary life and implicating the audience in the emotional field it generates. Portraits of Anxiety embodies a pared‑back optical clarity with considerable psychological depth. The result is an installation that is technically spare yet conceptually dense.

Experience the immersive nature of the installation in the video below, overlaid with the work’s original sound composition.