The Mirror Between Us

2025, Oil on Italian Linen, 111.8x213.2cm

The Mirror Between Us reimagines the architecture of protest. In 1968 Paris’s streetscapes were engulfed in violent student protests. Barricades fashioned from cobblestones and street furniture arose along boulevards that had been designed for pageantry and access. This work considers what happens when resistance is built not from the debris of the city, but spectacle itself. Where barricades once stood, the monumental mirrorball acts not as a weapon, but an interruption.

In this alternative history, the barriers are altogether something more fragile. The object suggests a obstruction, yet its surface reflects our own histories, narratives and, indeed, the very nature of conflict. The mirrored surface does not absorb violence; it multiplies, fragments, disperses, and returns the gaze, implicating everyone. With the glass functioning as a lens, the question is whether what divides us is structural or psychological, political or perceptual.

In this shift from confrontation to introspection, the work proposes that the most enduring divisions are not built of iron and stone, but sustained through perception - from the narratives, images, and positions we adopt and project back onto one another. In this sense, the barricade becomes less an instrument of division than a mechanism of self-recognition.