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With Malika, home video jamming session
By Amir Zainorin
In creative work—and in life—we often confuse discipline with repetition. They can look similar from the outside: someone doing something day after day. But they grow from very different roots. Understanding the difference can mean the survival of a creative practice—and its capacity to stay alive, connected, and evolving.
Discipline is intentional, self-aware consistency. It means showing up—not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s about committing to your practice with flexibility, curiosity, and a willingness to shift when something no longer serves you. Discipline asks: Why am I doing this? What does the work need now?
For me, discipline has never meant sticking to one form. When I feel bored or stuck with painting, I move to collage, drawing, or writing. Sometimes, I take a walk or go cycling instead. That act of stepping away isn’t a detachment from art—it’s a way of reentering it through a different door. It connects my practice back to the outside world. The city, the street, the body in motion—all of that feeds the work in ways repetition alone never could.
Discipline includes breaks. Silence. Shifting gears. It includes letting go of what no longer works, even if it once brought success. It’s an ongoing relationship, not a contract carved in stone.
Repetition is simply doing something again and again. It can be useful—practice builds fluency, comfort, and confidence—but when repetition becomes mechanical, it loses meaning. You’re just moving your hands, not your mind or heart. It becomes habit, not growth.
There have been times when I’ve noticed this in my own routine. I’d return to the studio, follow the same steps, and make something that felt… empty. Not bad, just hollow. That’s when I knew I wasn’t being disciplined—I was just repeating.
Throughout my life, I’ve taken on many different roles. I’ve worked in hotels, led art workshops for school children, collaborated with other artists, and organized festivals. Many of these were short-term jobs—woven together out of necessity, curiosity, and survival. There were days when I’d clean rooms in the morning, teach art in the afternoon, and plan a community event at night. Sometimes all in one day.
But these weren’t just jobs—they were learning grounds.
Working in hotels wasn’t just about cleaning—it gave me firsthand insight into the lives of other migrants. I heard their stories, saw how they navigated life in a foreign country, and gained a deeper understanding of labor, struggle, and survival. That experience shaped my view of dignity and resilience—things that quietly enter my art.
The art workshops I facilitated brought me into contact with schools, organizations, and cultural institutions across Denmark. Each collaboration taught me something new—not just about art education, but about how the system works, how access is granted or denied, and how structure and creativity can intersect.
Organizing the Stateless Mind Festival was a whole other kind of discipline. It wasn’t just about curating content—it forced me to learn how to build something from scratch. I had to search for funding, write proposals, plan logistics, and collaborate with people from different backgrounds. It was overwhelming at times, but it gave me clarity, strength, and experience that no studio practice alone could offer.
These different paths might look fragmented to some, but they’re deeply connected. Each role I’ve taken on has shaped the way I see, think, and make. Adaptability became part of my discipline—not a distraction from art, but a way of staying rooted while remaining open.
Discipline is rooted in intention and awareness. It grows from paying attention and making conscious choices. Repetition, by contrast, is often based in habit or comfort—doing something simply because it’s familiar.
Discipline responds to change and growth. It evolves as you evolve. It allows space to pause, shift direction, or completely reimagine your process. Repetition tends to reinforce routine and familiarity, even when change is needed.
While discipline leads to depth, adaptability, and long-term development, repetition can lead to either mastery or stagnation, depending on whether it’s guided or automatic.
Discipline involves presence, risk, and listening. It’s active. It demands your attention. Repetition, when unchecked, often slips into automation and unthinking cycles—going through the motions without questioning why.
You might look at someone working every day and think: How disciplined. But if they’re just repeating the same gesture without question, they may be stuck in a loop.
On the other hand, someone who shifts between roles, pauses when needed, takes time to walk or do other things, and keeps their work connected to the world—they may appear scattered, but in truth, they’re practicing a much deeper discipline. One that listens. One that grows.
In my practice, I’ve learned that being disciplined doesn’t mean being rigid. It means being honest. It means making space for change—because real discipline is dynamic. It moves with you.
Let repetition be one of your tools—not your master. Let your practice stay curious, connected, and alive.
Keep listening. Keep shifting. That is the deeper form of discipline.
“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →”
Morning walk in Leipzig, Germany during my art residency at Pilotenkueche, 2022
At Roger Waters concert Copenhagen, 2023
In one of the Greek islands, 2019
Street performance with photographer Maher Khatib, 2010
Art workshop in Copenhagen, 2019
Unexhibited collage, 2015
Photo experimentation, 2017
Stateless Mid Festival , Venice 2022
Ink on bandages, 2025
My artistic practice did not begin with clarity. It began with loss.
But even before that, it began with something unexpected: a chance encounter. I did not come from an art background, nor did I plan to become an artist. My early life had little to do with galleries, studios, or exhibitions. Through meeting an artist by coincidence, a new path opened — one I had never imagined for myself. Quiet, almost ordinary, that moment planted a seed.
In the early 2000s, I experienced the erasure of a personal archive — drawings, writings, photographs, and certificates, all swept away. What followed was silence, a rupture that forced me to ask what it meant to make art at all. Out of that absence, I began again. At first tentatively: portraits of my mother, collages made from torn magazines, small acts of remembering. Art became a way to hold on, to stitch what was lost into something that could still speak.
Over time, the language of my practice shifted. What began as representational and memory-driven became increasingly abstract, poetic, and material-focused. I turned to what remained: old passports, rubber stamps, and maps. Later came gauze, bandages, atlases, rotan sticks, sound, and broken vessels. These were not just objects — they were carriers of lived experience, of migration, bureaucracy, belonging, and fracture.
My practice has since evolved into an ongoing dialogue between the visible and the invisible, the personal and the political, the past and the present. The works I create are layered, unstable, and open-ended. They resist finality. They do not explain. They ask to be met.
I listen more closely now — to how materials speak, to how sound vibrates through absence, to how silence, repetition, and chance shape a work. Performance, participation, and installation have become essential components. Whether I am writing on gauze strips with overheard phrases, constructing drums from x-ray films, or imagining a clay vessel collapsing on melting ice, the gesture is the same: to remain present with what unfolds.
Today, my practice is not about becoming someone new. It is about honoring what is already here — the trace of memory, the texture of place, the breath between identities. I do not begin with certainty. I begin with noticing — with what is fragile, unfinished, already slipping away. From there, something emerges: not resolution, but presence.
“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →”
by Milo V. Poulsen
The performance hasn’t happened yet.
But Amir’s already stepped away.
Not in silence, but in elasticity.
Not in retreat, but in recalibration.
There’s a shift unfolding—not loudly, not with fanfare. But with the quiet confidence of someone who has realized that sometimes, the most radical gesture is to not gesture. Amir Zainorin, whose body has long stood at the center of his performance practice, is now letting go. Not of meaning, or presence—but of control.
In a new work forming for one of his upcoming exhibitions, Amir is preparing a stage. But this time, he won’t be on it. The elements—those old collaborators we tend to overlook—will take his place. Time, weight, temperature, light. The kind of performers that don’t need an audience. The kind that don’t wait for applause.
Nothing will be done to the materials. They will simply be allowed to behave. To react. To unfold. To perform.
And in that quiet refusal to intervene, a new kind of presence emerges. A choreography of vanishing. A dramaturgy of slow collapse. The act becomes the non-act. The artist becomes the witness. And performance becomes a condition—one that doesn’t begin or end, but hovers, like condensation or breath.
This isn't disappearance.
It’s diffusion.
It’s elasticity.
Identity too, Amir seems to say, is not fixed. It stretches, it reforms, it rests. It resists the neat definitions we try to stamp on it. Just as this new work resists the demand to show. To explain. To climax.
The performance hasn’t happened yet.
But already, it’s happening.
About the author
Milo V. Poulsen is a writer of uncertain origin. Her work drifts between poetic reflection and conceptual mischief, often appearing where performance dissolves into presence. She prefers to remain offstage, letting the text do the talking.
“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →”
Pic: Think Tank (2014) is a collaborative work with Roboticist Malaysia, supported by the National Art Gallery Malaysia.
Consistency is the altar.
A blur, a brushstroke, a palette — repeated until it becomes a brand.
Style turns into currency. Discovery hardens into comfort.
But what if “signature style” is only boredom wearing designer glasses?
Consistency flatters the buyer, but shackles the maker.
Inconsistency unsettles the buyer, but frees the maker.
Both are strategies. Both are prisons.
To be consistently inconsistent is to refuse the altar.
To let each work shift, stumble, spark, and contradict.
To choose risk over repetition, becoming over branding.
Art is not obliged to soothe.
It is obliged to move.
Threads knot and unknot.
Gestures repeat but never the same.
The artist appears, disappears, reappears in another form.
Perhaps the only true signature is no signature at all —
only the freedom to shift, to risk,
to knot and unknot —
consistently inconsistent.
“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →”
Work in progress 2025
Rhythms of Identity
Solo Exhibition — Kunstpakhuset, Ikast, Denmark
27 September – 9 November 2025
“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →”
Forthcoming publication in collaboration with Kapallorek Artspace
Official Launch: 27 September 2025 at Rhythm of Identity, Kunstpakhuset, Ikast, Denmark
“What begins in silence doesn’t always stay there.”
The Absence Me is an upcoming publication by Amir Zainorin in conversation with Milo V. Poulsen. It is not a memoir, nor a catalogue, but something in between—a poetic, at times absurd, at times painfully honest dialogue between artist and critical companion.
Together, they explore five major artworks, revisit unexhibited pieces, and open the archive of memory, displacement, and fragmented identity. The book blends image, text, contradiction, and reflection—held together not by linearity, but by presence.
It is co-published with Kapallorek Artspace, who generously support the project by providing ISBN registration and guidance in making the book part of Malaysia’s public archive.
The official launch will take place in September 2025, during Amir’s solo exhibition Rhythm of Identity at Kunstpakhuset, Denmark.
Preorder information
Print-on-demand edition
Audiobook version
Online excerpts and preview pages
To stay informed, follow updates at www.amirzainorin.com or visit the online exhibition when it opens in Sept. 2025.
“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →”
From the performance 'Play Time' at FreshWind Biennale Iceland, 2017
New-ism is not an art movement but a lived practice. For me, it began in small rituals — cutting scraps of newspapers into collages, calling the prayer with my grandfather in Muar, watching bicycles move in unison through Copenhagen streets. It explores ritual, discipline, and transformation as the essence of contemporary art. Rather than producing fixed objects, New-ism embraces impermanence, participation, and process — inviting audiences to witness change, contribute gestures, and reflect on the fragile rhythms of identity and belonging.
Through performances, installations, and participatory acts, New-ism dissolves the boundaries between artist and viewer, art and life, the individual and the collective. But at its core lies a question: what is truly new?
Art history is filled with movements defined by style, manifesto, or ideology. New-ism, however, is not an “ism” in that sense. It has no fixed rules, no stylistic formulas, no single school of thought. Instead, it is a way of working — an engagement with ritual, discipline, and transformation. Art here is not a finished object but a lived practice, unfolding through presence and process.
When I was living with my grandparents in Muar, I remember the call to prayer echoing five times a day. My grandfather, though not a particularly pious man, always performed his prayers. He would gather us together, and before we began, he asked one of us to call for prayers. That moment — like singing to wake us all up — was one of the most moving rituals of my childhood. It was not only about religion; it was about discipline, about sound gathering us into one breath, one gesture.
Years later, in Copenhagen, I began to notice similar rhythms in unexpected places: the morning tide of bicycles, pedals turning almost in unison, carrying bodies forward in a collective cadence. These echoes — sacred and mundane — became the ground from which New-ism emerged.
The name carries its own contradiction. Rituals, discipline, repetition — these are ancient things. New-ism does not claim invention. The “new” is not about discovering something never seen before, but about recognising how each disciplined act produces difference. Every time a prayer is called, the voice shifts. Every wheel turns the same but not the same. Every collage cut and reassembled alters the fragments just enough to make them different.
The “new” in New-ism is not invention but recognition — that even repetition carries difference, and that in each gesture lies both memory and renewal. Nothing is ever wholly new, yet everything is always becoming.
I began this discipline not with clay or drums, but with trash. Old magazines and newspapers became my first materials, cut, torn, and reassembled into collages and assemblages. This practice was rooted in the moment I was first introduced to art-making by the late artist Jeri Azhari in Kuala Lumpur.
He only taught me a few technical things — how to stretch a canvas, how to use photocopies to make portraits — the rest I had to discover myself. What mattered more were the endless conversations we had, sometimes talking from afternoon until late at night, until the morning call to prayer reminded us it was time to sleep. Other times, we sat together in silence, saying nothing at all, simply embracing the quiet. In that rhythm of words and silence, I first learned that art could be its own ritual — a discipline of mind and presence.
As I see it now, these artistic rituals are not so different from religious ones. Just as prayer five times a day, or going to church every Sunday, binds the believer to a rhythm larger than themselves, so too does the daily discipline of the artist — coloring, cutting, reading, or simply sitting in solitude. If you have a studio, or just a quiet corner to reflect, that place becomes a chapel. The gestures, repeated and imperfect, become prayer.
For me, art is a religion. A faith not in dogma, but in process: the belief that through returning again and again to humble acts — cutting, layering, undoing, and reassembling — something greater than the sum of scraps can appear.
New-ism thrives in thresholds — the line between accident and intention, presence and absence, destruction and reconstruction. The artist does not stand above the work but surrenders control, becoming part of processes that hover between futility and devotion.
Daily disciplines of assembling and disassembling, gestures repeated until they lose and gain meaning, works shifting between physical and digital, personal and collective — these are not static objects but acts of becoming.
Materials are not inert. They are vessels of memory and markers of time. Paper frays, fabric fades, stamps blur into illegibility. Sometimes I dismantle my own past works, reassembling fragments into new configurations. In this cycle of destruction and renewal, materials carry scars like memory itself — fragile, layered, unfinished.
Unlike movements built on purity of form (Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism), New-ism embraces impurity — the unstable, the marked, the layered — as its core truth.
The viewer is no longer a spectator but a participant. Their presence, touch, or gesture completes the work.
In Dear Helle, I began by installing postcards on the wall. But the work did not end when the exhibition opened. Throughout the exhibition period, visitors were invited to write their own postcards and add them directly to the piece. The installation grew, shifted, and transformed through these contributions. Authorship dissolved; the work became a shared ritual of writing, remembering, and leaving traces.
In New-ism, art becomes a communal practice: a discipline of acknowledging impermanence, presence, and renewal.
In an age of speed, automation, and digital saturation, New-ism insists on slowness, tactility, and discipline. It resists spectacle and commodification, urging art to be lived rather than consumed.
By foregrounding process over product, New-ism destabilizes the structures of gallery and market. It offers instead a practice rooted in resilience, in rituals that ground us within cycles of making and unmaking.
New-ism is less a movement than a state of being. It honors imperfection, embraces discipline, and thrives in flux. It teaches that art is not something we finish but something we inhabit — always in transition, always becoming.
For me, art is a religion. Not one bound by temples or texts, but by the faith that daily gestures — cutting, layering, drawing, sitting in silence — can open us to transformation. To return to the work, again and again, is to pray. To assemble and disassemble is to believe.
And in this, I return to where it began: my grandfather asking us to call the prayer, the bicycles flowing through Copenhagen, the endless talks with Jeri. Each act the same, yet never the same.
This is our new ritual.
Though what feels new to me
may already be old to you.
And perhaps that is the point.
This is New-ism.
From the performance The hand Shake at Port's Residency Program, 2022
From the performance X- Box National Art Gallery Malaysia, 2010 
From Installation art at Heerup Museum, Rødover, Denmark, 2004
At my solo installation at Budderup Odekirke, Rebild, Denmark-2013 
Double Warhol, collage and acrylic on canvas, 1999
Shop til u flop, Collage and acrylic, 2006
Art has always been my gateway between self and world — a dialogue at once personal and collective. My practice did not emerge fully formed. It began with fragments, with chance encounters, with what was available at hand.
I was first introduced to art-making by the late artist Jeri Azhari in Kuala Lumpur. He showed me a few technical things — how to stretch a canvas, how to use photocopies to make portraits — but more importantly, we talked. For hours, for days, sometimes deep into the night until the morning call to prayer. Other times we sat together in silence, saying nothing, simply holding space. From him I first learned that art could be both discipline and ritual: not only about making but about being present.
In those early years, Pop Art caught my attention. Its bold colors and irreverence spoke to a childhood shaped by television shows, American films, and advertising images. In its repetition of icons I found both a mirror of my own fragmented upbringing and a language of critique. But Pop Art was not the end point. It was a gateway, one that eventually felt too neat, too closed.
A turning point came during my time on Perhentian Island. There, life was stripped to essentials. The sound of boat engines in the early morning would wake me. My feet sank into soft sand — shoes unnecessary. The sea was warm, inviting; you could dip into the water and stay there the whole day under the heat of the East Coast sun. Materials were scarce. We didn’t have many magazines or newspapers on the island, but I had a few cuttings of images I carried with me. I began using what I could find: discarded wood, ropes, fishing nets, sand from the beach, and those fragments of print. Out of scarcity came improvisation, and from improvisation, the beginnings of my practice: assembling what was broken, overlooked, or cast aside into something that could speak again.
A couple of years later, back in Kuala Lumpur, I was still working with popular images. But the experiments had expanded — into monoprint, woodcut, and assemblage. At the same time, I continued collecting what I could find: old newspapers, discarded magazines, and objects from the street. These fragments carried the city’s texture, just as driftwood and nets had carried the memory of the island. In KL, my practice became less about images alone and more about the material presence of what others overlooked.
In the early 2000s, I experienced a rupture: the total loss of my personal archive — drawings, writings, photographs, certificates — all discarded. Out of that devastation, I began again. At first I returned to the basics: drawing, painting, collage.
The actual turning point arrived in 2002, when I moved to Copenhagen. That shift — geographic, cultural, and personal — marked the beginning of a deeper evolution. Trash there was abundant, almost a paradise. Magazines and sales catalogues arrived daily through the pigeonhole door. Old furniture — chairs, tables, doors — was left on the corners where people threw things away. These discards became my resources, shifting my practice toward assemblage, layering, and improvisation on a new scale.
At the same time, I began to explore digital art more seriously. Video became both documentation and artwork in its own right. I experimented with video animation, photography, and moving images — a shift deeply influenced by my wife Pia. Alongside this, I entered performance: reading poetry and spending time with Ole Lillelund, the Danish beatnik poet. Together we created Escape from the Shark, a video of him reading poetry across the city. Copenhagen, for me, was not only a material paradise but also a testing ground for new forms — a place where assemblage expanded into performance, digital art, image, word, and sound.
Only later did I begin to work with more charged materials: old passports, rubber stamps, maps, gauze, bandages, atlases, x-ray films, and broken vessels. These were not just objects. They carried memory, migration, bureaucracy, faith, and fracture. Each one was both surface and story.
My practice became less about representation and more about transformation. Collage gave way to installation, to performance, to works that breathe with participation. In Dear Helle, visitors added their own postcards to mine, dissolving authorship into collective ritual. In Rhythm of Identity, kompangs made from x-ray films became instruments played by others, layering sound over the fragility of skin and memory. With Gravity of Time, I am exploring the inevitability of collapse: clay vessels placed on blocks of ice, waiting to fall as their foundation dissolves. The work already exists in its title and conception — the collapse is only a matter of time.
What links these works is not style but attention — to process, to fragility, to the unstable beauty of impermanence. I am drawn to gestures that resist finality: cutting, layering, undoing, reassembling. To rhythms that echo both prayer and daily life: repetition, silence, listening.
Today, my practice is not about producing a fixed image of identity. It is about inhabiting the in-between: visible and invisible, personal and political, memory and forgetting. It asks for patience, for openness, for presence.
Still evolving, still shifting. Art remains my question and my answer — a site of negotiation between past and future, certainty and doubt, loss and renewal.
Silver, Acrylic on paper, 2010- from the Most Wanted Series
The Thinker, Collage on polyester, 2006
Lincoln, Postcards Assemblage on Softboard, 2013
Photos: All photos are credited to En. Ameruddin Ahmad
In 2005, I presented Peti Seni at the National Art Gallery Malaysia. This installation transformed a cabin-like structure into an open space of reflection, using fragile paper “flags” inscribed with the 99 Names of God alongside cuttings from daily newspapers. Visitors were invited to participate in an open workshop, making their own flags from old newspapers and simple A4 sheets, which they then planted on the floor and walls of the cabin. Peti Seni became a collective work where faith, identity, media, and impermanence intertwined. Looking back, it marked my first major spatial installation, a turning point that laid the foundation for later explorations of migration, hybridity, and the shifting line between the sacred and the everyday.
When visitors stepped into Peti Seni, they entered a cabin whose walls were already lined with fragile paper flags — the 99 Names of God written one by one, pinned with satay sticks, side by side with flags cut from daily newspapers. Names like Ar-Rahman (The Compassionate), Al-Hakim (The Wise), Al-Batin (The Hidden), Az-Zahir (The Manifest), Al-Adl (The Just), and Al-Ghafur (The Forgiving) hung in delicate rows, alongside others such as Al-Qahhar (The Subduer) and Al-Muntaqim (The Avenger) — reminders that the divine is not only mercy but also power, justice, and awe. Sacred in origin, these names also carried the weight of archetypes — qualities that reached beyond religion, touching memory, imagination, and the collective unconscious. Their presence alongside newspapers and children’s handmade flags created a dialogue between devotion, politics, and play.
The work grew further through an open workshop organized with the help of Amerrudin Ahmad and staff from the National Art Gallery. Children came in, sat with old newspapers, simple A4 papers, and colors, cutting and painting their own flags before planting them on the floor and walls of the cabin. Their contributions blended with the flags I had already installed, creating a rhythm between the sacred names, political headlines, splashes of color, and improvised gestures. Over time, the structure filled with layered voices: prayers, fragments of news, children’s drawings — fragile yet full of energy. Authorship dissolved into something collective.
What was ironic is that during the workshop I was invited for an interview with a journalist elsewhere in the gallery building. When I left, the cabin was almost empty, with hardly anyone inside. But when I returned a couple of hours later, the space had been transformed. The walls and floor were suddenly filled with children’s flags, layered among my own. In my absence, the work had grown, shifted, and become something else entirely. I felt a deep joy in seeing people participate and engage with the work, but at the same time there was also the realization of losing control — or perhaps recognizing that too much control is an illusion. The best thing to do was simply to let go. That moment struck me deeply — if a couple of hours could so completely change the atmosphere, what could two days, two years, or twenty years do?
At the same time, outside the gallery, another struggle over words and symbols was unfolding. In Denmark, where I was living, the Prophet cartoon controversy erupted, sparking global debates on freedom of expression, sensitivity, and violence. Protests filled the streets, flags were burned, lines were drawn. I was living then in Balloon Park in Amager — a former army barracks once used to test cannons and later to house German refugees during the final months of World War II. Surrounded by that charged history, the controversy struck me deeply. I sat down to write my thoughts, which were later published by the Danish newspaper Information in the book Muslim Dagbog (Muslim Diary), alongside contributions from others.
For me, the connection to Peti Seni is clear. Both were about how words and symbols live in the world — how they can wound, divide, and provoke, but also how they can be shared, repeated, and transformed. Inside the cabin in Kuala Lumpur, the words were not weapons but invitations: fragile flags mixing prayers with headlines, children’s play with history, belief with impermanence. The work became a mirror of the wider struggle I was living through — caught between Malaysia and Denmark, between faith and freedom, between the sacred and the everyday.
Looking back, Peti Seni was the moment when I began to see space itself as a medium — not just an empty container, but a field where identities, beliefs, and contradictions could be lived out together. The cabin was fragile, temporary, and collective. It still echoes in everything I do.
I can also see now how Peti Seni planted the seeds for many of my later works. The fragile flags and children’s participation anticipated my use of stamps, passports, gauze, and kompang made from x-rays — materials that invite touch, repetition, and collective authorship. The interplay of the sacred and the everyday, of personal memory and political context, continues to shape how I work today. In that sense, Peti Seni was not only my first major installation, but also a quiet blueprint for the questions of identity, impermanence, and belonging that I am still exploring.
“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →”
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With Malika, home video jamming session
By Amir Zainorin
In creative work—and in life—we often confuse discipline with repetition. They can look similar from the outside: someone doing something day after day. But they grow from very different roots. Understanding the difference can mean the survival of a creative practice—and its capacity to stay alive, connected, and evolving.
Discipline is intentional, self-aware consistency. It means showing up—not just physically, but mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. It’s about committing to your practice with flexibility, curiosity, and a willingness to shift when something no longer serves you. Discipline asks: Why am I doing this? What does the work need now?
For me, discipline has never meant sticking to one form. When I feel bored or stuck with painting, I move to collage, drawing, or writing. Sometimes, I take a walk or go cycling instead. That act of stepping away isn’t a detachment from art—it’s a way of reentering it through a different door. It connects my practice back to the outside world. The city, the street, the body in motion—all of that feeds the work in ways repetition alone never could.
Discipline includes breaks. Silence. Shifting gears. It includes letting go of what no longer works, even if it once brought success. It’s an ongoing relationship, not a contract carved in stone.
Repetition is simply doing something again and again. It can be useful—practice builds fluency, comfort, and confidence—but when repetition becomes mechanical, it loses meaning. You’re just moving your hands, not your mind or heart. It becomes habit, not growth.
There have been times when I’ve noticed this in my own routine. I’d return to the studio, follow the same steps, and make something that felt… empty. Not bad, just hollow. That’s when I knew I wasn’t being disciplined—I was just repeating.
Throughout my life, I’ve taken on many different roles. I’ve worked in hotels, led art workshops for school children, collaborated with other artists, and organized festivals. Many of these were short-term jobs—woven together out of necessity, curiosity, and survival. There were days when I’d clean rooms in the morning, teach art in the afternoon, and plan a community event at night. Sometimes all in one day.
But these weren’t just jobs—they were learning grounds.
Working in hotels wasn’t just about cleaning—it gave me firsthand insight into the lives of other migrants. I heard their stories, saw how they navigated life in a foreign country, and gained a deeper understanding of labor, struggle, and survival. That experience shaped my view of dignity and resilience—things that quietly enter my art.
The art workshops I facilitated brought me into contact with schools, organizations, and cultural institutions across Denmark. Each collaboration taught me something new—not just about art education, but about how the system works, how access is granted or denied, and how structure and creativity can intersect.
Organizing the Stateless Mind Festival was a whole other kind of discipline. It wasn’t just about curating content—it forced me to learn how to build something from scratch. I had to search for funding, write proposals, plan logistics, and collaborate with people from different backgrounds. It was overwhelming at times, but it gave me clarity, strength, and experience that no studio practice alone could offer.
These different paths might look fragmented to some, but they’re deeply connected. Each role I’ve taken on has shaped the way I see, think, and make. Adaptability became part of my discipline—not a distraction from art, but a way of staying rooted while remaining open.
Discipline is rooted in intention and awareness. It grows from paying attention and making conscious choices. Repetition, by contrast, is often based in habit or comfort—doing something simply because it’s familiar.
Discipline responds to change and growth. It evolves as you evolve. It allows space to pause, shift direction, or completely reimagine your process. Repetition tends to reinforce routine and familiarity, even when change is needed.
While discipline leads to depth, adaptability, and long-term development, repetition can lead to either mastery or stagnation, depending on whether it’s guided or automatic.
Discipline involves presence, risk, and listening. It’s active. It demands your attention. Repetition, when unchecked, often slips into automation and unthinking cycles—going through the motions without questioning why.
You might look at someone working every day and think: How disciplined. But if they’re just repeating the same gesture without question, they may be stuck in a loop.
On the other hand, someone who shifts between roles, pauses when needed, takes time to walk or do other things, and keeps their work connected to the world—they may appear scattered, but in truth, they’re practicing a much deeper discipline. One that listens. One that grows.
In my practice, I’ve learned that being disciplined doesn’t mean being rigid. It means being honest. It means making space for change—because real discipline is dynamic. It moves with you.
Let repetition be one of your tools—not your master. Let your practice stay curious, connected, and alive.
Keep listening. Keep shifting. That is the deeper form of discipline.
“Read more about my upcoming exhibition Rhythms of Identity →”
Morning walk in Leipzig, Germany during my art residency at Pilotenkueche, 2022
At Roger Waters concert Copenhagen, 2023
In one of the Greek islands, 2019
Street performance with photographer Maher Khatib, 2010
Art workshop in Copenhagen, 2019
Unexhibited collage, 2015
Photo experimentation, 2017
Stateless Mid Festival , Venice 2022
