UTILITARIAN HEART 2019

The work is an artistic polemic against Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian ethics. In it, I analyze the mechanism of human aspirations, dominated by the dichotomy of pleasure and pain, from which it is difficult to break free.
The personal and familial thread of the work stems from reflections on the home where I was raised, where a person’s value was often measured by their quantifiable “utility.” A key childhood memory from my family home is a heart-shaped needle case sewn by my grandmother. This small everyday object, constantly pricked and worn out, became an inspiration for me. It is a kind of “heart-engine”—a biological artifact subjected to the rigors of efficiency. On a social level, the object poses a critical question: what does it mean to be valuable in a profit-oriented civilization? Referring to the publicationINNER-OUT, the work illustrates the dramatic tension between the painful violation of one’s own boundaries (INNER) and the instrumental treatment of relationships in order to achieve success (OUT).