Do You Still Remember Them?

Using the motif of the candle as a symbol of remembrance, the artist romanticizes the Day of the Dead and its associated rituals, while also highlighting the superficiality often underlying the act of honoring ancestral memory. Beneath the appearances of human relationships and memories stretches a subterranean realm inhabited by the ghastly and intangible “something” that transcends the material world while remaining inescapably bound to it through the process of biological decomposition, trapped in the incessant and merciless circulation of matter. Similarly ambiguous were the bonfires lit on graves in pre-Christian Slavic traditions – on the one hand, they acted as signposts for souls, on the other, they were meant to protect the living from untold horrors, purging the air of pestilence called Death.