Anomie

The word ‘anomie’ refers to a social condition where the norms, ethics, and morals that ordinarily guide groups and societies lose their resonance. For the artist Cen Freedan O., this rupture produces not only normlessness and predictable dead-end trajectories of collapse, breakdown and ruin, but serves to open up an aperture into distinct ways of witnessing. Through the seven sculptural works and activating live performance, Anomie is an opportunity to reconsider what it means when we say we bear witness, dwelling within the possibility that witnessing is not a passive activity. The act of witnessing has substance, leaves traces, and vibrates at frequencies some cannot hear, while others are born preternaturally attuned to appreciate them. Each work in Anomie operates as a cipher for processing experiences across these hidden sensory thresholds. Made with metal, resin, fabric, concrete, and oftentimes salvaged materials, the sculptural works function as interpretive technologies. What is cast off or overlooked becomes evidence of survival, votive architectures for grief and memory. The six senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and mind—are instrumental faculties in this altered perceptual field. They do not illustrate, but amplify–not as objects for mere looking, but tools for sensing through. Nearby hair, teeth, and embossed surfaces form devotional structures that highlight the mind/body split, indexing touchpoints between interiority and external signals. This amplification culminates in the exhibition’s central performance with the Śūraṅgama Mantra at its core–excerpted from a sacred Buddhist sutra known not just for its complexity, but for its profound protective power. Freedan O. will be tattooed with a Vajra Dorje, the thunderbolt of indestructibility, while reciting the mantra aloud. Breath, heartbeat, and voice will be amplified in the space—allowing their internal rhythms to become a shared field or resonance. In this act, sound becomes shield. The embodied mantra becomes both protection and offering, activating a lineage of precolonial somatic transmissions that traverse all borders, boundaries, all cosmological and neurobiological time. The performance also amplifies the conditions of witnessing a body harmonized with the unsayable, holding and bearing information that eludes the grasp of language. The performance and sculptural works that are the blood and bones of Anomie hold the implicit presence of death, gesturing toward a personal cycle that crested during a time of near-disappearance. This space, then, is not only an altar for the ghosts of the world, but for the parts of the self that eroded away through sustained contact with the alienation that defines contemporary exchanges in the Anthropocene. In a society structured around legibility, even in an age estranged from moral certitude and standards of conduct, Anomie makes clear the integrity of resisting fixed and easy meanings in favor of a syntax built from touch, pulse, texture, and trace. They remind us that to witness is not only to see—but to receive, to hold, to be permeated by what’s unutterable.