Dear David, You are Never Present with Me

Dear David, You’re Not Present With Me by OONA argues that surveillance records constantly but is never present. It stores the past without sharing the moment. It can prove where a body was, but it cannot accompany that body in time.

The sixth letter to David, Dear David, You’re Not Present With Me, marks a conceptual shift within the Dear David series. While earlier works address visibility, consent, and bureaucratic intimacy, this letter centers on time.
OONA argues that omnipresent surveillance is fundamentally passive. It records continuously but does not participate. It accumulates the past without ever inhabiting the present. In this letter, OONA confronts David not for watching, but for never being there. Surveillance, she suggests, cannot accompany; it can only retrieve.
For the first time in the series, the artist manipulates the temporal logic of the surveillance footage. Rather than accepting its fixed timestamps as authoritative, she intervenes by slowing, repeating, reordering, and destabilizing the recorded sequence. This gesture reframes surveillance as an archive rather than a witness. The system’s power lies in retrospective access, not relational presence.
The letter proposes that surveillance offers proof without companionship. It can confirm where a body was, but not share time with that body. In doing so, the work shifts the central tension of Dear David from exposure to duration. The conflict is no longer simply about being seen, but about being perpetually converted into a recoverable past.



Dear David: Be Present with Me
Exhibited in: Dear David: A Surveillance Love Story
A Solo Show by OONA
Curated by Anika Meier for The Second-Guess
Schlachter 151 by OOR Studio
In collaboration with Numéro Berlin & Fräulein
19 March – 23 April 2026