THE SAMSA ENIGMA
SOLO EXHIBITION
COMMISSIONED BY
THE JEWISH MUSEUM PRAGUE
THEME: OBSESSION; AUTHORSHIP
An immersive installation from the depths of the subconscious → Paying tribute to Kafka on the occasion of his 140th birthday → A theatrical-like docufiction → Revisiting “Metamorphosis”, one of Kafka’s greatest short stories
These days, in most cases, we consume literature only as video on YouTube → Flipping through a printed book now feels almost like a period performance → The habit of reading is fading, but curiosity, perhaps quite the opposite → This is how the exhibition “The Samsa Enigma” was born: from an old and familiar hunger for engaging with fiction rather than facts → An engagement with imagined certainty instead of dry truth → An attempt to invent a world that never was, but maybe could have been →
The starting point is simple: what if Gregor Samsa, not Kafka, was the true author of “The Metamorphosis”? → And what if the famous opening paragraph of the story was constructed from a list of book titles Samsa had written during his life, books that no one bothered to preserve? → In this project, I created twenty-four covers of books that were never written → Twenty-four empty books → Each one represents a moment, a thought, an emotion, or a breakdown, of that forgotten, fictional writer →
The work is an immersive narrative installation in a darkened space that resembles the set of an old theater → Visitors enter and find themselves in the heart of a literary mystery that begins with a familiar text but quickly departs from it → Instead of written texts, large-format prints cover the walls, floor, and ceiling → They function as mental remnants of a literary consciousness that has unraveled → As if one had stepped directly into the fevered mind of Gregor Samsa himself →
While Kafka became a literary metaphor for existential irony, Samsa, in his reimagined persona, has turned into an icon of obsessive, almost compulsive writing → He writes again and again about transformations, dissolutions, metamorphoses → He tries to understand through text what cannot be understood → Perhaps that is precisely why his books remained empty → Or maybe that’s why they vanished →
