There is a leakage and it cannot find me, 2026
This project was made possible with the support of Amarte Fonds and Stitching Pulchri Sacrum.
Special thanks to Elena Apostolovski for her guidance through the Amarte Experts trajectory.
Installation view, photo by Nati Hoki.
What happens when borrowed forms of identity are taken in and begin to turn inward?
Is there a kind of hybrid creature that can no longer escape any definition of itself, whether chosen or imposed?
"There is a leakage and it cannot find me" navigates a fragile structure of identity. Between origin and its mutations, what emerges from the body might return as a mechanism that distorts it. What is hidden expands into the visible, and the visible retreats into the hidden, as the body loses orientation within its inside and its outside, swimming in its own viscera, liquids, skin, and everything that touches it. It trembles between the feeling and the gaze, between anchor and the forces that pull it, between source and lost residue, until the boundaries begin to dissolve.
Pargod / partition screen. Photo by Nati Hoki
Ceramic, gear wheels and chains, metal structure, pencil drawing, shower curtain rings.
Lost tears wandering.
10-minute video loop, TV screen, floating belt, motorized wheeled platform.
Originating from an archetypal ground and transforming with every iteration and constellation, the crocodilian figure in my practice is forever navigating between intention and perception, her notion and her reality, experiencing a perpetual identity crisis. In the research that unfolds through this exhibition, she becomes the vessel in which the outside and the inside collide.
This state of confusion reaches its peak in the expression “crocodile tears”. I approach those tears as both physical and metaphorical raw material—a substance through which I map confusion, traps, and escape routes. While “crocodile tears” conventionally refers to fabricated sadness, make-believe tears, or even tears shed while consuming prey, I am interested in asking what a crocodile’s tears become in a world where crocodile tears have been expropriated from the crocodile itself. I am less concerned with their sincerity or authenticity—whether the emotion behind them is sadness, joy, or excitement—than with what happens when the crocodilian figure investigates her own tears. Where is the line between their physical actuality and the metaphor that confines them? In what form are they authorized to exist while carrying their ambiguity?
The more the crocodile tries to grasp them, the further the tears slip away.
External mechanisms attempt to impose definitions that tear the body apart. Every definition and identification traps this complex entity, clotting the organism until it becomes stiff, fragile, and breakable. With every break, something is leaking—inside, then outside, then inside again. Crocodile tears fall and disappear, evaporate or merge with the sea—transient and elusive, they hold an in-between moment in which different planes of identity blur. Something shifts, to the point that:
The crocodile cannot recognize her own liquids.
The liquids cannot recognize their own crocodile.
Plasma-cut and engraved metal.
Photo by Nati Hoki.