Gallery Entry

Hollow Morn

By Alina Suleimen · KZ

The Hollow Morn is a psychological work of historical fiction centred on the moment when an ordinary family is confronted with the machinery of state violence. Set in Dublin in 1915, during the First World War, the piece follows the emotional consequences of an execution notice: the shock of official language entering a private life, the terrible distance between an administrative decision and the human being who must endure it, and the way fear, memory, love and helplessness transform a seemingly simple document into something almost unbearable. The work is interested in what cannot be reduced to information. A notice may contain a name, a sentence and a date, yet it cannot contain the lived reality behind them: the remembered voice of a loved one, the physical sensation of waiting, the instinct to hope when hope has become irrational, or the moral weight of deciding another person's fate. A second short work, The Endless Road, is included as supporting material. Although set in a different war and historical moment, it extends the same concern into a contemporary military landscape: the distance between institutional narratives of conflict and the private human experience carried by those caught within them. Together, the two works consider war across generations not primarily through strategy or spectacle, but through memory, vulnerability, moral uncertainty and the persistence of individual consciousness. In the context of Human After All, both works speak to the distinction between processing human experience and actually inhabiting it. Systems — bureaucratic, military or technological — can classify, record and transmit decisions with extraordinary efficiency. What they cannot fully contain is grief, attachment, conscience, ambiguity, memory and the stubborn human refusal to experience a life as merely a piece of data. The central question linking the two works is therefore simple: when systems become increasingly capable of producing language, judgments and records, what remains irreducibly human in the person who must live with their consequences?

Category

WRITING

Approved

6 October 2026