You never know when it will explode

Yoou never know when it will explode, is an immersive VR film and spatial sound work developed through conversations and collaborations with writer and joutrnalist Qasem Waleed. The project marks the artist’s first sustained engagement with virtual reality, 3D modelling, 360° sound, and spatial video technologies, representing a significant departure from previous modes of practice. Developed through experimentation rather than technical certainty, the work embraces risk, improvisation, and disorientation as part of its methodology. Rather than employing immersive technologies as spectacle, you never know when it will explode approaches VR as a space for thinking through grief, witnessing, distance, and political rupture. The work explores how immersive environments can alter perception — collapsing boundaries between presence and absence, intimacy and distance, embodiment and fragmentation. The project originated after the artist encountered Waleed’s text I am stuck in a box like Schrödinger’s in Gaza, which led to an ongoing exchange of conversations and recordings made from within Gaza. Influenced partly by Waleed’s own interest in quantum theory and uncertainty, the collaboration evolved into an exploration of what the artist describes as “quantum listening”: the possibility of listening to multiple realities simultaneously, and of being transformed by what is heard. considers how histories of violence persist — not as closed events, but as recurring structures that continue to shape perception, emotion, and everyday life.