By taking part in a one-of-a-kind talent show for artists – New Rembrandt in the Netherlands – I made it into the final eight contestants. In the episode in which I was eliminated, I presented a performance created under strict time pressure and a series of technical obstacles. Instead of executing my original plan, I chose a gesture with a simple message: time is the most essential ingredient in artistic work.
In that episode we were asked to create a piece inspired by objects found in an antique shop. Rather than fighting the limitations, I made them my subject. My performance became a reflection on what truly constitutes the creative act, and why forcing creation without time strips it of meaning.
The performance consisted of several simple, symbolic actions. I used sheet music found in the shop, which I “bloodied” with red paint, giving it a sense of transformation and the passage of time. During the live broadcast I broke Chinese porcelain – old plates – and turned one of the shattered fragments into a brooch, a material trace of the event, a witness to my action. The entire piece was built around the idea of silence as a creative space. A line from the film Copying Beethoven became central to me: only in inner silence can one hear one’s own music. “The silence between the notes.”
The performance sparked a range of reactions, from understanding to surprise. What mattered most to me was that it opened a conversation about the role of time and authenticity in art.
No further edition of the program was ever produced – despite being created by Dutch experts in talent and reality formats whose concepts and licenses have fed the global entertainment industry for years.
Years later I returned to that moment and recreated the plate I had broken on the show, giving it new interpretations. I combined the visual language of the porcelain plate with my drawings, using AI tools. This gesture became a way of closing the story – a return to the material that once witnessed the pressure of time, and can now exist free from it. The rebuilt plate is not a reconstruction but a continuation: another layer of meaning that has grown around that performance and its consequences.