Title: Copy Paste – An Anatomy of a Regret Letter
Artist: Thayù
Medium: Mixed media installation (emails, print, sound, projection, sculpture, interactive elements)
Year: 2025
Artist: Thayù
Medium: Mixed media installation (emails, print, sound, projection, sculpture, interactive elements)
Year: 2025
Exhibition Statement
In Copy Paste – An Anatomy of a Regret Letter, Kenyan multidisciplinary artist Thayù invites audiences into the often-unseen psychological terrain of professional rejection. At once deeply personal and universally resonant, this installation confronts the sanitized, templated language of rejection emails, particularly those from donors, festivals, and institutions that, while praising potential, ultimately decline to partner.
Using actual rejection emails received over the years, Thayù builds an immersive journey that mirrors the emotional lifecycle of a creative pursuit: the initial spark of hope, the frantic labour of proposal-making, the silent dread of waiting, and the blow of polite dismissal. Visitors pass through these stages physically, emotionally, and sonically, guided by layered installations that include printed correspondence, soundscapes of looping regret phrases, mirrored confessionals, and interactive typewritten stations.
What emerges is not simply a critique of institutional gatekeeping, but a visceral meditation on how rejection is internalized, how it chips away at mental health, erodes creative confidence, and plants seeds of self-doubt that bloom in silence. Each rejection, though small and bureaucratic, carries weight. In Copy Paste – An Anatomy of a Regret Letter, that weight is laid bare.
Through its candid exposure of pain, Copy Paste becomes an act of reclamation. Thayù reclaims authorship over the words that were meant to dismiss, transforms them into an anatomy of resilience, and insists that we look, not away, but within.
Exhibition date: To be Confirmed