Artist Talk: The Absent Pulse

As part of the residency “Re:imagining Connections”, guest artist Jana Hammoudeh will give an artist talk and present her current work at ZKM. She will speak about her artistic practice and her interactive audiovisual installation The Absent Pulse. The installation will be accessible throughout the day.

The Absent Pulse is an audiovisual meditation on memory, decay, and rebirth – a reflection on the fragile relationship between nature, human intervention, and the machine. The work began with a simple but haunting question: what if nature could remember? From that thought, it grew into a collection of visual memories – fragments of nature’s beauty, its manipulation, and its reinterpretation through human and artificial perception.

The project explores how untouched nature gradually becomes disrupted and reshaped through human and machine interference – until all forms collapse into silence, an absence of pulse. For Jana Hammoudeh, that absence represents the slow internal death caused by human abuse, the quiet decay of what was once alive and vibrant. It is not an instant death but a gradual one that mirrors how we continue to exploit what gives us life. Yet, within that stillness, a faint heartbeat returns, suggesting that even after destruction, nature endures and regenerates.

Program

10 am–6 pm: Preview at PanoramaLab, ZKM Foyer

2 pm: Artist Talk in the Medialounge