MEDALLIONS

SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEO

What begins as a portrait of her great-grandparents—executed in a Polish forest in 1939—becomes, in Medallions (2010/2025), a meditation on how all form dissolves: into movement, into particles, into the natural logic of impermanence. The video moves from personal memory to something elemental, tracing how everything we hold onto—identity, image, history—is always in motion.

Mytych draws the figures using ephemeral materials—fine particles arranged into detailed forms that briefly hold the shape of a body. When sound is introduced through Chladni’s vibrating plates, the image begins to shift. Frequencies pass through the surface, and the figure dissolves—its structure breaking apart, reassembling, and eventually transforming into another. The image does not vanish; it changes. What appears solid is revealed as a temporary alignment of energy and matter.

The title refers to jewellery medallions once worn to preserve the image of a loved one—a gesture toward permanence. Medallions reframes that impulse, suggesting instead that everything—memory, identity, presence—is held together only briefly, before returning to the deeper rhythms that shape us.