Artyom Kunevich’s "Repression" series (2024), crafted through artificial intelligence, suspends us in a liminal void where civilization lingers as a shadow of itself, stripped of telos. The image—a desolate expanse of withered flora and cloaked figures dissolving into mist—renders time as a palpable absence. The 3:2 aspect ratio constricts the frame, mirroring the suffocation of a world where motion is an illusion, and the muted palette whispers of a reality drained of vitality.

Kunevich’s own words—“imagine a civilization frozen in timelessness, deprived of direction and meaning, living in endless anticipation of escape, a culmination, a catharsis—no traces—no time—chaos 100”—evoke a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of being when stripped of progression. This is not chaos as eruption but as stasis, a silent entropy where humanity is reduced to spectral forms, caught in an eternal deferral of resolution. The use of AI as a medium amplifies this dislocation, blurring the line between the human and the machinic, as if the algorithm itself mirrors the desolation it depicts.

"Repression" confronts us with the abyss of non-becoming, where the absence of catharsis becomes its own ontology. Kunevich, through this digital elegy, asks: what remains when the future is foreclosed? The work exists as a meditation on the unrepresentable—a civilization not in collapse, but in suspension, where the very notion of meaning is held hostage by an unending present.