Lady Dior - As Seen By

The Work

For the project, artist Mona Oren created a sculptural work centered on wax - casting replicas of the Lady Dior bag and allowing them to exist in a state between solidity and dissolution. Alongside the sculpture, we created a film that treated the object as a process rather than a finished form, documenting the wax bag melting in reverse as it gradually emerged from a white, liquid surface.

The sculpture and film were presented together as part of Dior’s Lady Dior - As Seen By exhibition as it traveled internationally, including stops in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Beijing, Tokyo, Milan, São Paulo, and later at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and in Düsseldorf. Across these contexts, the work functioned as a focal point within the exhibition, moving fluidly between gallery display and live event settings.

Mona’s practice often engages with transformation, fragility, and repetition. In this work, the Lady Dior bag - a symbol of luxury, permanence, and design - is translated into wax, a material defined by impermanence and sensitivity to time and heat.

The film does not document the bag as an object, but as a process. Shown in reverse, the melting becomes an act of construction: the form appears to rise out of the wax moment by moment, suspended between creation and disappearance, as if being remembered rather than made.

Filming Process

I filmed the work using a Canon 7D, with a deliberately simple studio setup. The bag was placed on a heating plate and lit using basic Kino Flo lamps. The technical simplicity was intentional; the complexity lay in timing and restraint.

We had only two wax bags available to melt. Each take required careful planning and a precise understanding of how the wax would behave - when it would collapse, when details would soften, and when the form would begin to dissolve irreversibly.

This was not my first collaboration with Mona, nor my first time filming melting wax. That familiarity allowed me to anticipate the process: when to change camera position, when to hold a shot, and when to let the material dictate the frame. Filming became a form of choreography between camera, heat, and matter.

Exhibition Context

During the opening event at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the wax bags were integrated directly into the space as illuminated centerpieces, placed along long dining tables that extended through the hall. Above them, the film was projected large-scale onto the museum’s concrete walls, hovering over the room as guests moved, ate, and gathered beneath it. The slow, continuous motion of the melting bag played out in real time across the space, contrasting with the formality and movement of the event below.

This physical arrangement - sculptural objects embedded within a social setting, paired with a monumental projection - positioned the work between exhibition and ceremony, allowing the film to function not as documentation, but as an active presence shaping the atmosphere of the event.

Collaboration

This project is one of many collaborations between myself and Mona Oren, whose work I have filmed across different materials and contexts over the years. Our shared language — built through long-term collaboration — made it possible to work with economy and trust, allowing the process itself to guide both the sculpture and the film. In this way, filming becomes less an act of documentation than of attention: staying with material and time as they transform, and letting the camera participate in fragility, duration, and emergence rather than directing them.