Paul Bacaj

Unequal in Death, 2024

Who gets memorialized? What obligations do we owe the dead? And whose death do we decide matters more, is more worthy of a marker or tribute?

These two graves stand side by side, and each one bears images of death. Death memorialized but being forgotten, and death ignored. Gravestones and markers for beloved, remembered dead, and the impersonal listing of COVID casualties, names that fly by too fast to be appreciated. Death is not equal; there is a hierarchy even in dying, even in burial. What communities are given better access to care and prevention, and why?

COVID-19 has exposed the biases and brutalities of our current healthcare system and public health apparatus. Intersectional analysis shows that disabled communities, black communities, Indigenous communities and others already deal with marginalization and a lack of direct, focused care. It was these communities that were hit hardest by COVID, and are still being disproportionately affected. Vaccination rates are declining, masking is being phased out, and yet people continue to die, to become disabled.

What are we doing to honor the legacy of those who already died, and what are we doing to prevent others from suffering?

What are we doing to make sure those who died from government indifference and antipathy didn't die in vain?

What will we do to protect the vulnerable? The sick, the immunocompromised, the disabled?

What will you do?

About the Artist

Old film has a texture and a life all its own. VHS damage, video-disc interlacing, chemical burns on negatives. All these signifiers of decay and age create an alluring nostalgia around them. They speak to times before, before even the lifetime of a viewer, and yet their continuation into the present makes them feel out of time too. My work takes that feeling and seeks to recreate and implement it into videos and sculptures, to find some essential element of that technological nostalgia and fuse it with my sensibilities.

Working primarily in digital video, my work retains an analogue texture where I can include it, and my sculptural work is focused on texture and tactility above form. Drawing from historical precedents of the 20th century and beyond, such as German Expressionism, Art Deco and filmmakers such as David Lynch, Maya Deren, John Carpenter, Nobuhiko Obayashi and Sergio Leone, one of the main things that draws me to creation is to take the disparate influences that have impacted me and recombine them into new forms flavored by my experiences and perspective. Not just to be a passive consumer, but to regurgitate my consumption back out into a less recognizable shape. A new synthesis, a new amalgam. Such as in my short film ‘Dead Man’s Lips’ from 2024, which took direct and blatant influence from classic film noir cinema and forwent a mystery in favor of lingering in the emotional space of the narrative.

Those ‘emotional spaces’ are frequent pieces of my art – creating places for neglected feelings to be expressed and released, feelings often constrained and restricted by society at large. Feelings tied to trauma, neglect, isolation, loneliness, anger and frustration that run through much of the art I consume and which have all touched my life to various degrees.

I hope my work makes the viewer engage on deeper levels and find the deeper layers that are baked into it. Not just layers of my own conscious creation, but the layers that escape my notice, that even I remain ignorant to until viewing the final result.