Our nowadays world is marked by increasing local and global violence, such as ongoing genocide, financed wars, poverty, systematic oppression, discrimination, and environmental crises. These complex challenges originate from deep, unhealed individual and collective wounds, leading to widespread collective insecurity.

This diptych series (composing a pair by single images) yielded my personal journey through the question: "What have you done today to make the world a better place?" and it is created for this exhibition based on abstract photographs taken between 2020 and 2024. While seeking answers amid hopelessness and fear in this journey, utopia seems often distant, the present reality is recognized as broken and complex, however it invites reflection on transformation linked to the practice of compassion and acceptance inwardly. The diptych form balances the tension inherent in lived dualism and weaves acceptance and renewal into a dynamic whole.

Thus, this work invites the viewer to reflect on the journey inward that is inspired by the following quote while seeking an answer to the question in the title:

"...energy knows no boundaries. Whenever we are asked to keep our eyes and hearts closed, we do just that because it is easier than taking responsibility for a world and humanity that need healing. It is easier to understand that healing the world requires a heroic effort from us to heal our own inner world. We dim the light of our own future. It is the challenge of letting our love flow actively and boundlessly through which we find greater and deeper degrees of our personal liberation and the global liberation of all beings. The Dalai Lama once said: 'Compassion is the radicalism of our time.' This is true; today we rebel by loving more. When we see and treat each other as family, we will know global peace." — Inwards, Young Pueblo, p. 213

​

mustafa kemal kim
photographer * visual artist