Transsubstantiation is a diptych exploring the tension between material substance, symbolic meaning, and religious representation. The installation consists of two plinths filled with black gravel. On the left, a cross stands encased in a transparent resin block; on the right, a traditional wooden crucifix lies horizontally.
The left cross is made of minced meat—flesh in its most fragmented, vulnerable form. By sealing this perishable material in resin, the work stages an inverted form of transubstantiation: flesh that does not become sacred, but is immobilised in a state of suspended decay. It becomes hyper-present while stripped of its natural temporality.
The wooden crucifix serves as the referent, the historical devotional object. The meat-cross becomes the signifier, a radically materialised symbol that exposes and destabilises the sacred charge of the sign. In Saussurean terms, the installation reveals the gap between sign and meaning, between matter and transcendence.
Transsubstantiation asks where meaning takes shape—in the body, in the icon, or in the unstable interval between them. The work occupies that fissure where decay and devotion reflect and undo one another.