Curatorial Statement:
Inhale the Hours unfolds as a diary of domestic solitude, told through the unsteady rhythm of breath and posture. Shot in black and white, the series locates its emotional register within a private interior—half stairwell, half bedroom, wholly unguarded. These are not spaces designed for viewing. They are functional, transitional, and yet the artist renders them stage-like: liminal territories between performance and retreat, inertia and self-invention.
The model does not occupy these rooms so much as haunt them. Her gestures are unhurried, non-performative, but intensely aware of time’s weight. The vape smoke, curling through otherwise static frames, becomes a visual stand-in for the passage of time—exhaled seconds marking the suspension between days. The half-dressed body, the slouched limbs, the sideways glances are not about seduction, but about the theatre of boredom, the soft aggression of being seen while doing nothing at all.
Here, solitude is neither melancholic nor romantic. It is bare, textured, honest. What emerges is not a narrative of longing, but of defiance against the need to manufacture one. The motifs—a discarded shirt bearing cryptic script, an empty glass tilted at rest, hair cascading over steps or mattress—carry the residue of choices not made for others. Each frame asserts: this is not a performance for you. This is the choreography of being alone, when the world is no longer looking.
There is poetic dissonance between the softness of skin and the hardness of spatial geometry, between breath and surface, between what is revealed and what remains uninterpreted. The camera lingers, but nothing asks for attention. The photographs hold space, instead, for what resists closure: the quiet, the not-yet-dressed, the hours that pass without naming.
Inhale the Hours does not offer resolution. It offers a mood, a presence, and a refusal to tidy solitude into aesthetic containment. What makes it arresting is precisely this: it recognizes that stillness, too, has weight—and sometimes that is enough.
List of Photos at Saatchi Gallery
