3324

A 24-Hour Drawing Performance

March 25, 2021 | Red Door Gallery, Copenhagen

 
I. Prologue – The Question of the Self

Who am I when observed hour by hour?
Who do I become as time unravels me?
If I strip away the distractions of the world, face myself in the mirror, and draw what I see—not once, but 24 times in 24 hours—what will be revealed?

On my 33rd birthday, I embarked on a drawing ritual, a self-imposed exile into time and repetition. In the solitude of Red Door Gallery, I created 24 self-portraits, each marking the passage of an hour, each confronting the restless, shifting nature of the self.

This was not an exercise in representation but a test of endurance, an act of devotion, a meditation on presence. Each drawing was followed by a polaroid photograph, a machine’s indifferent record of my emotional state. Together, they formed a conversation between perception and documentation, between the seen and the felt.

II. The Concept – Drawing as a Mirror of Time

To draw oneself repeatedly is to dissolve the idea of a single, fixed identity. The self is not one, but many, unraveling and reassembling with each passing hour.

At 33, the number itself holds weight. In Hindu thought, it is an age of propulsion or collapse—the moment when one either breaks through into a higher plane of existence or begins to fragment. In the West, it is the beginning of the so-called mid-life crisis, when time is no longer infinite, and the question of meaning becomes unavoidable.

This performance was my way of marking this threshold, of documenting what it means to be in transition—between identities, between past and future, between control and surrender.

Drawing became the ritual. Time, the altar. The mirror, the witness.

III. The Process – The Ritual of Drawing

Location: Red Door Gallery, Copenhagen
Duration: March 25, 2021 – 00:00 to 23:59
Format: 24 self-portraits drawn each hour, accompanied by 24 polaroid photographs

For 24 hours, I followed the same ritual:

  1. Face the mirror. Begin again.

  2. Draw for 20-30 minutes. Let the lines appear.

  3. Take a polaroid. A mechanical trace of presence.

  4. Hang the drawing on the gallery walls. The hours accumulate.

With each cycle, exhaustion set in, and the drawings began to shift—looser, more fragmented, rawer. Some felt like distorted echoes, others like premonitions of a self not yet lived. The act of repeating the face over and over again was like summoning ghosts—past selves, future selves, selves I had forgotten or never fully met.

The mirror reflected not just a face, but a distortion of time, thought, and memory. Who was I really drawing? The person in the moment, or the version of me I had seen an hour before? Was I witnessing change, or just retracing the same image, slipping deeper into an altered state?

IV. The Meaning – Seeing the Unseen

The further I went, the less I tried to capture resemblance and the more I tried to witness presence.

Drawing as Exorcism – Each stroke released something unseen, pulling fragments of self from the subconscious.
Drawing as Devotion – A relentless act of witnessing, where exhaustion stripped away hesitation.
Drawing as Truth-Seeking – But what is truth, when the face at 3 AM is not the same as the one at noon?

With each passing hour, my face felt less personal, less familiar—as if I were drawing a stranger who only existed in that particular moment. The act of repetition blurred the line between:

  • Observation & memory – Was I drawing my reflection, or my impression of the last drawing?

  • Presence & distortion – Did fatigue warp my vision, or was I finally seeing clearly?

  • Control & surrender – Was I guiding the drawing, or was it guiding me?

V. Epilogue – What Remains

At the end of 24 hours, the walls of the gallery held 24 versions of myself—some hauntingly familiar, others utterly foreign.

The performance ended, but the drawings remained—a physical record of time passing, of presence fading and returning, of the self dissolving and reforming.

What remains is not just a collection of portraits, but a trace of something deeper.

Because to draw is to search, to ask without expecting answers, to see beyond the face and into the unknown.

And perhaps, in that search, something true is revealed.