The Book of Loss

 

The Book of Loss is my personal conversation with the bigger than life issue of loss. I had to deal with it for the first time when I lost my father in the fall 2014.

 

Every morning I would open my eyes and think it is all behind me, only to realize that him being gone is more real than ever. This book is the remembrance of things past. For 40 days in a row, I took selfies with my phone in the morning, while I was still in bed, thinking about him, trying to find the energy to go back to the daily life. With my self-portraits I capture the essence of the dark and bewildering journey of mourning and try to dissect the most confusing aspect of the human experience – death.

 

The book of Loss is a small intimate book, consisting of 28 self portraits monoprinted on Japanese handmade paper. It is all in black and white with occasional brush strokes of white paint over the images. The paper is really thin and slips away from your fingers. You can see the ghost prints and the stains through the pages. The portraits come and go. They fade in and fade out, just like my dad’s condition in the last months. There is no physical quality to the imagery since the white tissue-like paper erodes the harshly printed image into a pale abstract combination. This book doesn’t say much, there are no words in it, as there is nothing to say when one feels distances. It is only to be touched and experienced individually. It is the book of loss. It is present, but very much absent at the same time.