The Eternal Return

Photography and transactional performance

The Eternal Return examines the policy of merchandise returns at IKEA as both material and metaphor. Through the act of purchasing, assembling, documenting, and ultimately returning furniture, the artist stages a critical inquiry into the cycles of creation, consumption, and erasure that frame contemporary artistic production.

The project draws from Mircea Eliade’s notion of eternal return—a mythological structure through which the world is perpetually re-created. Here, that cycle is reenacted within the transactional logic of the global retail industry. The only lasting artifact is the photograph: the residue of a conceptual and economic exchange between artist and institution.

Initially constrained to the medium of photography, the work functions as both evidence and trace—capturing the tension between the desire to create and the realities of limited resources: no studio, no budget, no storage. In this context, IKEA’s return policy becomes a readymade system for staging artistic labor, reflecting the fragility and precarity that often underpins creative processes.

The Eternal Return asks: What does it mean to produce something from nothing? Can a work exist only in its disappearance? And how might artistic value circulate through the very systems that threaten to erase it?