What Remains Beyond

2021
Thermal photography, prints on translucent tracing paper, wood, steel and LED light
130 unique portraits
Installation: 500 × 70 cm

What Remains Beyond explores what remains of our identity when the familiar visual markers through which we recognize and categorize one another begin to disappear.

For this project, Olga photographed individuals using a thermal camera. Rather than recording visible light, thermal imaging registers heat, revealing something that normally remains invisible to the human eye. At the same time, characteristics such as age, gender and skin colour become less distinguishable.

The installation brings together 130 individual portraits, printed on translucent tracing paper and presented across a five-metre-long illuminated structure. Light passes through the images from behind, echoing the way thermal imaging reveals what normally remains unseen. The work shifts attention from the visible surface to what might exist beyond it.

Presented side by side and removed from their usual context, the individual portraits gradually become part of a larger collective. What Remains Beyond asks what is left when the outward characteristics through which we define ourselves and others begin to fade. What remains beyond the visible? And is there something beneath these differences that connects us?