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LOBSTER PHONE
2023
Archival pigment prints
140 × 105 cm each


Moving between appropriation and nostalgia, the photographic series Lobster Phone revolves around the construction of history, the dynamics of individual and collective memory, and the ways these narratives are represented. The retro-cool telephones of the 1960s and 1970s reference not only Dalí’s original eleven lobster phones, commissioned in 1938 by his wealthy patron Edward James for his London house and country mansion, but also the culturally iconic, though historically inaccurate, red phone, endlessly reproduced in film as the supposed direct line between the White House and the Soviet Kremlin. Carefully staged and photographed under precise lighting against the void of a black background, the images emphasize the lobster phone as a fetish object and everyday item simultaneously. By rearranging these familiar forms into improbable compositions, the series evokes subconscious associations—sometimes uncanny, sometimes sexually charged—revealing the hidden desires, contradictions, and humor embedded within the capitalist unconscious. Just as the lobster itself underwent a remarkable transformation—from “the cockroach of the ocean,” once food for the poor, servants, prisoners, and soldiers, to a contemporary symbol of luxury—the objects in the series highlight processes of cultural reinvention and myth-making. In a performative appropriation, the objects also appear in the short film The Call (2023), playfully blurring history and fiction, merging the absurd, the nostalgic, and the surreal. Across both photographic and cinematic forms, Lobster Phone proposes a speculative archaeology of objects, in which history is not fixed but continuously rewritten, expanded and reframed.




︎ Archive Photography