Not In My Name

“Not in My Name” appears to be a work of apparent simplicity, yet one that is deeply layered. The black circles, resembling burial niches, create a serial rhythm that evokes anonymity, accumulation and loss: not individual graves, but repeated, almost industrial-looking modules.
Inside, there are marks that resemble Arabic script, yet belong to no language. What appears to be a name is in fact a ‘non-name’. The viewer attempts to read, but finds only emptiness: form without meaning.
This emptiness is not neutral. It triggers cultural and geopolitical imaginaries, undermining the very mechanism of attribution: who are the dead we imagine? Whose names do we believe these to be?
The title introduces a refusal: no one can speak ‘on behalf of’ those who have no name. And it is precisely this absence that renders the symbols universal — belonging to no one, and therefore to everyone.
The work navigates between mourning and critique, between memory and erasure. It does not tell stories, but denounces their disappearance. It exposes a mechanism: identity that is emptied, simulated, projected. And the viewer is called upon to question themselves.
The work also denounces our own complicity, in the graphic fusion of Arabic and Western symbols.
So could these names also be our own?
13 circular elements
Plexiglas and expanded PVC
2026