This project grew out of what I observed during my years in Prague through the COVID-19 pandemic. I grew up with the myth of an ideal West — stability, honest governance, institutions that worked. Prague embodied that image. I lived there for fourteen years, and this project is a reflection on those years.

I arrived carrying that projection, and that is precisely why I saw what I saw. Someone without an idealised image does not notice its collapse. The pandemic did not destroy my worldview in the abstract. It broke it through two specific scenes I witnessed first hand.

June 2020 — the feast on Charles Bridge

During the first lull in lockdown, Prague residents held a spontaneous feast on Charles Bridge, organised by the civic activist Ondřej Kobza. People sat pressed together, without masks or distancing, photographing themselves beside the relief of Saint John of Nepomuk — thrown into the Vltava for refusing to reveal the secret of the Queen's confession — touching the bronze, making wishes, drinking wine. A ritual for good luck on a site once used for executions, death within arm's reach, and no one saw it. A severe second wave followed.

October 2020 — the minister

Roman Prymula, the Czech Minister of Health, an epidemiologist and the author of the country's strictest measures, was photographed leaving a restaurant without a mask — a restaurant his own decree required to be closed. The scandal was immediate and he resigned.

The cover opens from both sides. Inside are two spreads, one for each event, four embroidered compositions in total. The pages are quilted with a dense interlining so the book holds its shape in the hands.

The material is new linen, in deliberate contrast to Louise Bourgeois, who worked with old fabric. The book is a slow, embodied gesture set against the instantaneity of the media image: it cannot be seen all at once. It asks for time and a bodily gesture, and it translates two events that reached everyone through mass media back into a private format, held one to one rather than broadcast.

The feast as illusion — the happiness of not knowing what is to come. The future is an empty Charles Bridge, a bridge usually thronged with tourists.

The red outline is loose and alive rather than a rigid architectural drawing; against the linen it reads like a sketch in red ink, done in thread instead. It is an outline rather than a filled scene: the bridge is present as a line, and almost all of it remains empty space.

The piece inverts David Černý's sculpture, which raised a middle finger at Prague Castle in protest at the Communist Party's return to power.

Here the logic is reversed. The symbol of Czech power gives the finger to society, the sculpture facing the city rather than the castle. The government imposed strict restrictions on everyone while ignoring them itself: the Castle flips off the people through its own double standard.

This work is about how the people around me — myself included — lived through the war between Iran and Israel and America, with Dubai unexpectedly at its centre.

The fabric is a remnant of an old pillowcase. Dubai is a city of panoramic windows; during those days people reinforced the space around the glass with mattresses, pillows and blankets against the risk of a drone strike. That domestic, almost instinctive gesture of protection is a material memory of the days themselves, which is why I chose this fabric rather than a neutral canvas.

I saw the drones myself, above my own garden — the garden where I had always sheltered from the noise of the city. But most of the anxiety came through an intermediary: the phone, the feed, the neighbourhood chats, the calls to friends. A single direct moment of witnessed threat and an endless stream of information about it are two experiences of a different nature, of the same war, and both underpin the work.

Embroidery is slow, solitary, close to meditation, set against a news feed that never stops changing. The rows of stitches do not depict days. They stand as the equivalent of the feed, and together their shape forms the outline of a phone screen — the visual rhythm of push notifications, anxiety arriving not as a single blow but as an endless stream of small vibrations. The hand gesture is not a comment addressed to anyone. It is a record of my own state, as I lived it.

I am not documenting the events of the war but the experience of receiving information about them: a specific twenty-first-century form of war experience, anxiety lived through a mediator rather than through presence. Net art and mobile art have explored the phone as a medium in itself, the device as canvas. The reverse movement — translating screen-based experience into slow, manual, embodied labour — remains largely undeveloped. This work proposes that translation.