Rupture

"Rupture" is an ongoing series that explores how we consume intimate violence as entertainment while it remains largely invisible to cultural consciousness.

Each photograph captures an entire scene of interpersonal violence in the form of fictionalized rape, femicide, domestic abuse, or hate crime from popular films and television series, rendered abstract through long exposures that match the duration of each scene. The camera dissolves these carefully lit, choreographed spectacles as their saturated colors and movements accumulate through time.

Meanwhile, their real-life counterparts remain largely unseen, unreported, under-investigated, and unpunished. They happen in private spaces, beyond the reach of documentation and dismissed as personal matters rather than public concerns. Only in rare instances when cameras intervene do they become "real" to the broader culture. Recent years have marked a watershed moment as surveillance footage, body-cam recordings, and cell phone videos have forced a number of private traumas into public awareness, calling attention to the multitudes that continue to exist out of sight, out of mind.

The resulting images mirror how entertainment media has trained us to process these violences: as aestheticized, consumable blurs that distance us from their brutal realities — not unlike how traumatic memory itself accumulates and fragments through repetition. The titles echo the last lines of dialogue spoken during their respective scenes; the final traces of a ruptured narrative.