Between Zero and One

In the exhibition catalogue, Hady Sy presents his project as a search for “a path toward coexistence” between organic intelligence and technological intelligence, between memory and computation, between the hand and the algorithm. These worlds are not placed in opposition but brought into the possibility of an ethical encounter, one in which technology serves humanity while safeguarding its dignity. Yet the works themselves, as they unfold throughout the exhibition space, appear far less confident about the stability of this balance. They do not deny the possibility of coexistence, but they simultaneously reveal just how fragile it is.

Hady Sy builds his sculptures from the binary language of zero and one. This is no longer a theoretical metaphor but a tangible, almost unsettling experience: bodies that walk, carry burdens, grow weary, yet are themselves written in a digital language. Here, the catalogue’s assertion that “the human being cannot be reduced to data” encounters its own contradiction within the work itself. For these bodies are indeed digital. Yet they still preserve something that resists such reduction: memory, dignity, or perhaps simply the determination to remain standing.

In this sense, Hady Sy’s work does not advance a finished thesis. Rather, it opens up a space of tension between what ought to be, technology placed at the service of humanity, and what already is, a world in which human beings are increasingly reduced to data. It is precisely from this tension that the works derive their strength. Not from providing answers, but from leaving the question unresolved. 

If the catalogue sketches the horizon of coexistence, the works themselves unfold through a series of stations that may at first appear unrelated, only gradually revealing themselves as chapters of a single narrative: that of the human condition in an age of reduction.

That narrative begins at the origin, with the seed, with the “primordial soup” invoked as a metaphor for the emergence of life, not as a moment of purity, but as the point of departure for a long process of transformation. Nature does not appear here as a silent backdrop but as an intelligence that precedes humanity itself, an intelligence embodied in the growth of trees, the flow of water, and the hidden order that governs living beings. Yet this origin is also one of repetition: the same stones are assembled in different ways to give rise to different forms of life.

The sculpture of the staircase marks the next stage. Bodies climb upward toward nowhere, suspended in a space without a discernible horizon. There is neither arrival nor return, only the continuity of passage. Migration is presented here not merely as a political event but as an existential condition, a destiny that accompanies modern humanity, for whom the journey itself has become the destination.

At the heart of this disorientation, tragedy reaches its fullest expression in works that evoke famine and war, most notably the sculpture depicting figures composed of zeros and ones carrying a plate while walking across corpses. The first paradox, grasped by the eye before it is articulated by the mind, is that these bodies, despite their digital reduction, continue to hold their heads high. Yet the scene soon turns upon itself as the very same forms assume the appearance of soldiers, perhaps standing over the very corpses they had moments earlier seemed to mourn.

The form does not change, yet its meaning is reversed: from victim to executioner. It is as though violence has no need to invent new forms, merely reusing the same ones after assigning them a different code. This is more than a simple reversal of meaning. It exposes a deeper mechanism of domination, whereby the same forms can be redeployed in contradictory contexts without ever losing their original appearance. In this respect, the work recalls the world of George Orwell, where power asserts itself not through rupture but through the inversion of meaning from within language itself, as well as that of Haruki Murakami, where violence slips into everyday life under familiar, almost ordinary guises, making it difficult to recognize at first glance. What Hady Sy achieves, however, is neither linguistic nor narrative. He transforms form itself into the site of tension between opposing meanings, revealing that what we see is not always what is.

This logic of repetition finds its echo in other works, such as Cactus, where the memory of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas appears not as a closed historical episode but as a pattern that continues to reproduce itself. The world, these works suggest, never ceases to produce new “others,” pushed to the margins or condemned to disappearance. Past, present, and future converge: the colonial past, the turbulent present, and a future open to the recurrence of similar destinies.

Along this same trajectory emerges Sisyphus, not as an isolated mythological figure but as the distilled image of a universal human condition. The burden never ends, and the effort begins anew, not as an individual punishment but as a condition of existence itself. Yet this world is not entirely devoid of openings through which another meaning may enter: a rose, a kiss, the trace of love. Fragile though they may be, these gestures continue to resist the logic of brutality.

The themes thus reveal themselves not as separate subjects but as the interconnected strands of a single web: origin, wandering, violence, repetition, and resistance. Together, they portray the human being suspended between what might have been and what has, in fact, become.

If, at the conceptual level, these works point to a world in which the human being is reduced to a number, their true power lies in the way they are materially realized. Iron, and particularly Corten steel, is not merely a medium here but a language in its own right. Hard, heavy, and typically associated with construction and infrastructure, with everything functional and enduring, it is redirected from its ordinary purpose. Hady Sy bends it, curves it, and shapes it into forms that evoke the human body, as though rigidity itself were compelled to acknowledge the fragility it contains.

This tension between hardness and curvature operates not only at the level of form. It reenacts what becomes of the human being in times of war: a body that learns to bend, to adapt, to calculate, without entirely losing the trace of its humanity. Iron thus becomes not the body’s opposite but its distorted extension, its translation into a world governed by the imperatives of measurement and power.

These sculptures do more than represent our world. They offer a sensory reconfiguration of it, making visible what often eludes language and allowing us to touch what is ordinarily reduced to numbers.

Perhaps that is why these works leave such a lasting impression. They do not offer a meaning to be consumed but an experience that continues to unfold within us. An experience that compels us to reconsider what we had taken for granted: what it means to be human, to belong to a place, and to inhabit a time whose boundaries have become increasingly uncertain. And it is precisely within this hesitation, between what can be measured and what can be lived, between what can be calculated and what can be felt, that the question can no longer be deferred: How can the human being remain human in a world that is redefining itself in a language that is no longer entirely their own?