taste sweet, taste bitter 
large-scale concrete relief sculptures
2024





In colonised Libya, ancient Roman ruins were strategically mobilised as political tools, used to legitimise facist Italian rule by crafting a narrative of continuity with a ‘golden’ imperial past. Their restoration was less an act of preservation than one of spectacle, an attempt to revive the image of monumentality and, with it, the illusion of rightful return. In taste sweet, taste bitter, the slow, controlled, and strenuous act of piping concrete, akin to icing a cake, mimics and mocks the perceived sweetness of delicate forms. While the work appears to reconstruct an image of facades, it deliberately falls short, presenting imperfect repetitions. Icons that reveal the labour hidden in their forms. These decorative facades question the allure of monumental beauty, prompting one to contemplate the aesthetic object more fully, one marked by the countless lives intertwined with it.


Commissioned by 421 Arts Campus.



Images by Seeing Things Studio