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The Climb
Core Themes
Sexual harassment, retaliation, failed institutional accountability, the personal cost of refusal.
Artist Statement
A landscape shaped by endurance, where each step forward carries the risk of erasure. What remains is loss and disorientation. The inability to name harm within a system that normalises it. Violence is reframed as culture, dismissal, and inevitability, and then absorbed into the fabric of political life. The climb becomes cyclical, driven by persistence in the face of systems designed to invalidate both experience and resistance.
“Don’t make this into a drama, this is just how politics works.”
Concept Breakdown
The installation tells the story of a woman with over 30 years of experience as a campaign manager. When the politician she worked for invited her for drinks and she declined, his bruised ego set off a quiet but calculated campaign against her. The harassment was subtle at first, but gradually, the party she had devoted her career to began turning its back on her. Decades of work unravelled because of one man’s wounded pride.
When she attempted to file a complaint with the party’s ethics committee, she discovered he had control over it. The investigation was swiftly buried, dismissed with the claim that she was simply “being too emotional.” The installation takes the form of a staircase representing her career, each step marking a year of her journey. A black doll placed on every step traces her progression: her presence, her persistence, her climb. At the top, the staircase is destroyed by a red ball, a symbol of corruption, harassment, and unchecked power brought crashing down on everything she had built.