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THE PROPHECY
2024
4K video | 16:9 | 4.52 min. | color | sound


In The Prophecy, a single object becomes the site of a complex temporal negotiation: a voice recorder replays the words of a fortune teller whom the artist visited in China more than a decade earlier. The image is formally restrained and visually rigorous—a single, unwavering shot of the recorder staged within a studio environment reminiscent of a museum documentation space. Its clinical precision and near-scientific neutrality contrast sharply with the charged atmosphere of the soundtrack, in which the fortune teller confidently predicts the artist’s future success, wealth, and recognition should he pursue sculpture, photography, or film. Irony subtly permeates the work, yet its central concern lies less in skepticism than in the entanglement of temporal regimes. The recorder appears as an archival artifact, preserved in a state of apparent permanence, its stillness interrupted only at the end by the artist’s hand switching it off. Against this visual stasis unfolds a narrative oriented entirely toward the future—one whose credibility is openly questioned by a translator, yet simultaneously fulfilled through the artwork’s existence and exposure in institutional exhibitions. The prophecy, once speculative, becomes retroactively validated by its own mediation. In this convergence, past, present, and future collapse into a single audiovisual loop. The recorded voice from the past speaks a future that materializes in the present of the film, thereby granting both moments of a renewed form of truth. Time no longer advances linearly but folds back on itself, producing a recursive logic in which meaning emerges only through hindsight. The work treats the recording as both historical document and performative trigger, blurring the boundaries between archive and projection, documentation and fiction. By staging the prophecy as a musealized object, The Prophecy also reflects on the institutional mechanisms that confer value, authorship, and legitimacy. The artwork suggests—without resolving—the possibility that artistic success, like prophecy itself, may be less a matter of destiny than of framing. In this sense, the artist does not simply fulfill a prediction; he constructs the conditions under which it can be perceived as true.



Concept / Camera / Edited: Kay Walkowiak
Translation: Grace Wei, Lou Guangling, Shu-Fan Yang
Composition & Sound Design: Natalia Dominguez Rangel
Color Grading: Andi Winter
Sound Mix: Nigel Brown
Production Assistant: Barbara Walkowiak
Supported by: CNA Luxembourg



︎ Archive Film