In this evocative diptych, the east and the west, the ancient, the divine and the post-human converge in a visceral meditation on the state of the incarnated soul in an age of mechanized intelligence and escalating violence.
“Sirin in 2025 after Jesus who is screaming” reimagines the mythic Sirin - the Slavic bird-woman who once sang of paradise - as a fractured icon caught between sacred longing and technological rupture. Both personal and universal, this work is a testimony of an embodied soul who recognised her true nature and is questioning her place in a world increasingly driven by soulless AI and egos.
Using the assemblage technique, the work places two figures side by side on a shared stand, their materials and gestures in stark, almost accusatory contrast.
On the left, a real violin serves as the torso for a wayang-style woman’s head, her presence simultaneously serene and wounded. She is a composite of the Sirin and Awalokiteshvara, a goddess of creativity and compassion. Her four arms signal her multidimensionality:
- two held in acceptance prayer,
- one bearing a bloodied miniature bow,
- and another featuring a gesture of both blessing and warning (similarly to Christ in Majesty) - a relic of meditative continuity, beauty, and fragility. She embodies the soul, the artist, the dreamer, still reaching for transcendence in a world that increasingly forgets to listen.
To her right stands her counterpoint: a wayang man’s head, eyes bloodshot and unseeing, mounted atop a clockwork body - a sculptural embodiment of artificial intelligence and war. His torso is an exposed mechanism, a time-bound engine with no heart, no music. Where she bleeds and prays, he
computes and tries to dominate. However, put side by side, it becomes obvious he is only a dwarf next to her, monstrous ego screaming not in sacrifice, but in a relentless, dehumanized drive for control.
Together, these two figures form a tragic dialogue.
The Sirin, once the voice of divine joy, now stands as a fragile bulwark against the march of machine logic and militarized power.
The diptych captures the dissonance of our time: where creativity and soul are under siege by systems of unfeeling intelligence, and where the future echoes not with singing, but with screaming. The sculpture thus stages a stark confrontation between interiority (creativity, empathy, contemplation) and exteriority (instrumentality, calculation, mechanization).