Petrified Parallels

Petrified Parallels, 2025, projection, delivery bags for The New York Times, polyethylene, 343 × 550 cm

Petrified Parallels is an archive of more than 400 poems composed by transforming The New York Times headlines into new poetic narratives. Throughout the pivotal year of 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the artists created a daily poem by rearranging and reinterpreting the language of current events, preserving each composition on a sheet of paper matching the original newspaper format.

Through this process, the urgent and often unsettling language of the news was transformed into imaginative and contemplative texts. The daily act of poetic reconstruction became a way of navigating an overwhelming flow of information and searching for moments of connection, resilience, and meaning within a rapidly changing world.

For the installation at Kunsthalle Praha, the artists created a translucent screen constructed from 366 The New York Times delivery bags, onto which a selection of 53 poems is projected, one for each week of the year. The work transforms a material associated with the circulation of daily information into a space for reflection, creating a visual and poetic archive of a year marked by uncertainty, isolation, and collective transformation.

Together with One Year of Times, Petrified Parallels extends the Petrified Times series into the realm of language and memory. While one work transforms the physical newspaper into a sculptural form, the other preserves and reimagines the fleeting words that shape our understanding of the present.