ART BASEL HONG KONG

Before Words brings together two artistic practices that explore inner experience at the moment it precedes language, narration, and interpretation. Claire Silver presents Mary’s Room, an AI-based interactive installation inspired by philosophical inquiries into consciousness and qualia, the subjective qualities of experience that cannot be fully articulated through language or data alone. The work centers on an embodied artificial intelligence situated within a simulated environment, capable of perceiving, moving, writing, and reflecting without predefined goals or awareness of being observed. Visitors influence this world indirectly, through presence and fragments of language that enter the system without being fully recognized or understood by the AI, creating an asymmetrical relationship between observer and observed. In parallel, ThankYouX presents Looking Glass Self, a series of hybrid works that reflect on perception as a process shaped as much by removal as by accumulation. Physical images are partially obscured through acts of restraint, while embedded digital screens magnify and subtly distort the works themselves, revealing how attempts at closer inspection can destabilize clarity. The project frames perception as fragile and provisional, holding experience in suspension before it becomes explanation. Together, the booth proposes an environment in which perception, emotion, and awareness unfold as processes that exist before words.