Scale
Vania & Muggia / ICONOCLAST <Taylor Swif>,
Jerome Ming
<Ballroom Maquette - (Ersatz Edition)>
As I write this in October 2026, a random stabbing attack has taken place in Bucheon. While eating at a noodle restaurant and watching television, I saw the mugshot of a man accused of murdering his mother-in-law. Four separate crime stories were reported in the space of ten minutes.
In A$AP Rocky’s music video “Tailor Swif,” directors Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia create exaggerated, surreal scenes against the backdrop of Kyiv’s Soviet-era apartment blocks. Having produced commercials and music videos through the production company ICONOCLAST, the directors employ visual strategies that manipulate the perception of scale, building on techniques developed through their work on Dacia advertisements. Despite their apparent differences in size, the elements within these scenes seem to occupy the same continuous space. The absurdity of this succession of images evokes the disorientation of encountering one incomprehensible act of violence after another.
Jerome Ming,
Ballroom Maquette - (Ersatz Edition), 2026 ©
Jerome Ming
What happened that week unfolded in an instant. I needed to retrace the events to understand how things had gone wrong.
At the time, I was three months away from an exam. I shouldn't have made plans to have lunch with my mother while preparing for it.
She arrived late, and because I had another commitment afterward, I had to leave in a rush.
Whenever things went against my wishes, I found myself imagining violence. I would picture my mother falling, her face striking the pavement. I had developed ways of dealing with these thoughts: exercising or praying for them to go away. I no longer wanted to turn my violent impulses into fuel for my art.
Three days later, I went hiking with my mother, as I did every Saturday. She had always led the way, but as I grew more familiar with the route, I began walking faster, and she struggled to keep up.
We reached the summit quickly and decided to descend by an unfamiliar route. On the steep descent, my mother lost her footing and fell, striking her knee against a rock.
I tried not to panic.
I helped her up, wrapped a handkerchief around her knee, and supported her as we slowly made our way down.
Her knee never fully recovered, and she continued to struggle to bend it. I became convinced that my violent imaginings had damaged her. When she fell, what I saw seemed close to the image I had imagined days earlier, as if something within me had somehow found its way into reality.
Guilt tormented me.
This experience left me with a tentative thought: Could an individual's hostile thoughts toward another accumulate, giving rise to something as incomprehensibly large as war?
At Jerome's exhibition, I recognized a connection I had been struggling to articulate through my own experience.
The acts of breaking apart an eraser or sticking a pencil into one—small, seemingly private gestures of aggression—were presented alongside images evoking war. I began to see how thoughts and actions on a small, personal scale might accumulate into a current of evil whose magnitude is difficult to comprehend.
Jerome's decision to preserve the eraser and work with traces of violence through photography and sculpture felt like a form of practice: a
one that might hold these impulses within a work of art rather than allow them to take destructive form in the world.
Here, I return to Simone Weil's writing on evil.
"Where, then, are we to put the evil? We have to transfer it from the impure part to the pure part of ourselves, thus changing it into pure suffering. The crime which is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves. In this way, however, it would not take us long to sully our own point of inward purity, if we did not renew it by contact with an unchangeable purity placed beyond all possible attack." 1
1) Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, G.p> PUTNAM’s sons, 1952 p123-124