Exercise 5: Repetition – A Reflective Response
In creative practice, repetition is often misunderstood as a mechanical process — something mundane, mindless, or formulaic. But through this exercise, I came to understand it as a tool for transformation, attention, and revelation. What appears to be the same, over time, subtly shifts, revealing emotional, conceptual, and material differences.
Repetition in My Own Work
As I reflect on the body of work I’ve created during this unit — from The Bird Who Came From Afar to the visual layers of Aeolus and Nausika, the repeated emotional motifs, poetic fragments, and compositional attempts — I realise that repetition has always been present, whether I acknowledged it or not.
- I repeated visual frames again and again, editing, rearranging, searching for the right tone and order.
- I returned to certain poetic phrases that haunted me: wind, longing, distance, silence.
- I revisited emotional states — particularly loss, desire, dislocation — trying to articulate them through different mediums: drawings, photographs, and written reflections.
This process of repeating wasn’t aimless. Each return brought new nuances to light. Each attempt was slightly off, slightly new. That difference — however small — felt like a crack where truth could emerge.
Artist Reflections & Their Influence
Ragnar Kjartansson
His work — particularly The Visitors — demonstrates how durational repetition can amplify collective emotion. Repeating a musical phrase over and over, not only invites immersion but produces a subtle unraveling of meaning. In my own video works, I now understand how rhythmic pacing and looping visuals can convey an emotional landscape — not just illustrate it.
Harold Offeh
His durational re-performances of album covers in Covers taught me the power of embodied repetition. It’s not about imitation — it’s about inhabiting a moment over time. Similarly, my repeated attempts to express emotional memory through pose and gaze in self-portraiture reflect that performative re-enactment. The repetition becomes a means of honouring memory, not just representing it.
Marina Abramović
From Abramović, I learned that repetition in performance is a kind of ritual endurance. The emotional vulnerability in her work reminds me that to repeat an action is also to build resilience and clarity, to strip away distraction and surface emotion, and reach a more essential self.
Mika Rottenberg
Her use of mechanical, absurd cycles in labour reflects how repetition can highlight systems of control, exploitation, and value. I see a shadow of this in the emotional labour I’ve tried to visualise — especially when it comes to navigating relationships where roles are fixed and repetitive (provider, caregiver, partner), often without reciprocity.
Repetition as a Tool for Perception
This exercise helped me realise that repetition isn’t about exact copying — it’s about noticing change through familiarity. Like trying to recall the same memory over time, each iteration carries its own weather, its own tone. Through repetition:
- I became more sensitive to shifts in my visual language.
- I could observe emotional residue — what persisted, what faded.
- I began to develop a kind of perceptual muscle — not just of what I was doing, but why I was doing it.
Going Forward
In future works, I want to use repetition more consciously — perhaps by:
- Repeating the same subject (a face, an object, a line of text) in multiple media: drawing, photograph, poem, voice.
- Exploring looped time structures in my videos or installations — where viewers feel suspended in a moment, like a breath held.
- Using ritualistic repetition in my making process as a way of honouring certain memories, desires, or longings.
Repetition is no longer a fallback or failure. It’s a form of learning, of care, of commitment.
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