At the same time, it shows how every ascent remains dependent on conditions: what you carry with you, what you hold on to, and how the current behaves.

On top stands a male figure surrounded by a symbolic cage; cage and figure form one body. The colours are chosen as in a thermal camera: red stands for heat, energy, and propulsion, blue for cold standstill and delay. The body leans forward, as if trying to pull itself out of the construction. The cage resembles the shape of a burqa, as seen in the 3D animation on one of the screens.

Around and behind the figure, black vertical strips fall downward: not a closed cloth, but a rhythmic curtain that moves along, hesitates, collapses, and starts again. Wind is not background here; it is the invisible player that “plays” the installation. What you see is not only form, but also response: fabric listening to air—sometimes as if being lifted, sometimes as if immediately taken back.

Beneath the hanging figure sits a glossy, heavy red volume, a block of feelings like a block chained to the leg. On top of that red mass sits a small brain-shaped form: thinking, too, has weight—something that can promise lift, yet also pulls. It is as if the work builds an anatomy of motivation: the desire to move forward, and the mental ballast hooked onto that desire.

Two vertical screens extend this tension without explaining it. On one screen, movement becomes slow and sculptural: a flexible tube that would normally dance wildly behaves like a slowly breathing volume—while the wind in the ‘fun’ flags appears brutally driven and agitated. On the other screen, a female figure stands motionless, yet the fabric around her is alive: movement without displacement, dreams of displacement. By placing the screen images beside the moving ribbons, two kinds of wind become entangled: wind as physical force and wind as representation. They seem to coincide, but they do something else. Air thus becomes both a promise of lift and a deception: what looks effortless on screen proves, in the space, to be dependent, fragile, and conditional.

In this way, Thermal Promise forms an installation about “going with the wind” and “resistance” at once, but with a different tone: what comes first is not opposition, but the moment something lifts—and immediately shows what it costs to hold onto that moment. The construction promises freedom (wheels, modular, connectable), yet reveals that movement is never pure liberation: it emerges within a field of driving force, turbulence, and backlash. The work keeps balancing between buoyancy and blockage—a system that wants to move forward, and precisely through that desire continually makes its own conditions visible.

This temporary installation is a transformation that brings three earlier works together into one new body: the sculpture Gedachtenkooi (2016) and the 3D animations Carried by the Wind (2016) and Resistance of a Skytube (2020). What once existed separately as object and image is here connected through construction, weight, and air currents—as one system that makes itself move in real time.