PORTFOLIO

Hardly any other topic has preoccupied people across eras and cultures as much as love, sexuality, and relationships. Great love stories although they may be centuries old, are still timeless. Their narratives  are centered around these exact themes of desire, self-determination, first love, and longing in separation. The series reflects these stories in their time and at the same time asks what they still tell us today and why they continue to fascinate us.

In a present full of new wars and fear of freedom of speech, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago reads like a mirror of our fragility: What remains of humanity when compassion becomes dangerous? What remains of love when it provokes? In Stefan Zweig's The Impatience of the Heart, the characters seek redemption in others and fail because their love is based on insincerity, false expectations, and emotional dependence. Virginia Woolf's Orlando tells of a life beyond gender boundaries and conventions and asks how free we really are in love and identity. Marguerite Duras' The Lover depicts a forbidden relationship in colonial Vietnam in the 1920s and describes love as a power relationship, transgression, and sexual self-discovery

All four novels deal with toxic relationships, manipulation, social control, and the conflict between status, inner needs, and self-determination. At a time when staging oneself on social media is often more important than authenticity, these works show how deeply such patterns are anchored in our culture. Today more than ever, love and relationships are at the center of social debates—especially in a world full of crises, where the longing for closeness, security, and belonging is growing.