The Whole is the Untrue

2026, 1129 Hastings

“The Whole is the Untrue” is a project that emerged from a condition of historical, cultural, and epistemic fragmentation and from a reflection on Theodor Adorno’s critique of the Hegelian idea of a necessary connection between truth and totality. This body of work seeks to destabilize the rhetoric and idealization of wholeness. Taking as its point of departure an ancient vessel from the 1st–3rd century AD, excavated in present-day Iran, the work examines how the vessel’s shifting renditions across different media call into question the fiction of wholeness, both historical and contemporary, revealing how meaning fractures and reassembles across material, medium, space, and time.