Knife Pointed Up (2025)

Move away this instant! - that’s what we would hear at home whenever someone spoke a fate we didn’t want to invite. We knocked on wood so evil wouldn’t hear, lifted bags off the floor so money wouldn’t run out, avoided sitting at the corner of the table so we wouldn’t stay unmarried. These preventive rituals weren’t learned from books, but from everyday life, within the family circle. That’s how a symbolic world opened to us - one in which inherited gestures made sense, remembered equally by the body and by language.

Superstitions exist in many families - their forms adapt to context, but the core remains the same: a logic of conditional connection, where if A happens, Z will follow. Superstition is also an attempt to symbolically master what lies beyond our control - to conquer the sign through gesture, in order to briefly soothe the chaos of the world. While they may often seem absurd, these subtle rituals are not meaningless: the body recognizes them, even when the mind no longer believes.

In this work, I step directly into superstition by deliberately doing what shouldn’t be done -sitting at the corner of the table, placing my bag on the floor, crossing intersections diagonally. Others around me, mostly women, do the same - not to break superstition or tempt misfortune, but to make it visible, to recognize and reconsider it.

To me, superstition is a map - inherited, imprinted, but not final. With the work Knife Pointed Up, I try to read it: to understand what remains, and what I can consciously let go of, without fearing that I’ll lose myself in the process.