Bound / 2026

On Self-Binding considers the persistence of internalised constraint as a formative condition of identity.
Drawing from Jungian notions of the unconscious as structured through autonomous complexes, the work approaches repetition not as recurrence but as orientation – an organising principle through which the self is shaped and sustained. What was once learned in response to threat continues to operate beyond its origin, no longer as event but as structure.

Here, binding is not imposed but embodied. It appears through gesture, posture, and the quiet choreography of containment, where the body rehearses what it has already come to know. Constraint persists not through force, but through familiarity—through the return to forms that offer coherence, even as they limit movement.

The image holds a tension between availability and refusal: freedom remains present, yet the figure turns inward, inhabiting a spatial memory of restriction. In this sense, identity emerges not as a fixed state but as a patterned negotiation between release and return.

This is a love letter to the Adyghe nation, who endured one of the largest and most forgotten genocides of the 19th century – a history of forced exile, mass death, and bodies cast into the Black Sea. To lives erased. To pain denied witness.