Letters in the Dark

Letters in the Dark was originally shown as a two-channel video installation, accompanied by photographs at the Benrubi Gallery, New York, in 2016. In 2024, Hall decided to make it available as a single-channel work. Its subject matter is the brief epistolary romance between Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenská. From his gallery statement, “In my mind, the focus of the work is, to quote Judith Butler, the ‘poetics of non-arrival [that] pervades […], if not afflicts, his love letters…,’ a condition that is not entirely unfamiliar to most of us.” We only know of Kafka’s side of this exchange, which was originally published in 1952 under the title, Letters to Milena.  Jesenská’s letters were lost or perhaps destroyed at her request. A central part of this work is Hall's recreation of Milena’s letters. Again, from the gallery promotional materials, “I have tried to return her lost letters by writing them myself, which I did by assembling fragments of her published writings and by imagining the style and tone in which her exchange with Kafka might have been written.”