(Unconditional) Love Practice

185 x 265 mm
300-page book, electrical device, silver thread embroidery

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(Unconditional) Love Practice is an artist’s book composed of 300 photographs taken on an iPhone over ten years of Shin Danbi’s twenties. The images record people she loved, places she passed through, and ordinary moments that might otherwise have disappeared. Together, they form a personal archive shaped not by chronology, but by the continued practice of looking, remembering, and loving.

A square opening cuts through all 300 pages, leaving the centre of every photograph absent. Inside this void, a small flame-shaped LED emits light through the entire book. As the pages turn, the images change, while the illuminated absence remains.

The physical intervention makes each photograph incomplete, but also connects every image through the same source of light. The book becomes more than a container for photographs: it is an object in which memory, loss, and love coexist. What has disappeared cannot be restored, yet its absence continues to illuminate the images that remain.

The work was first presented as the central piece of Shin Danbi’s 2024 solo exhibition, (Unconditional) Love Practice, at CDA ZERO in Seoul. It was also presented alongside a photographic exhibition at The LINE LA in Los Angeles as part of To Rest One’s Gaze, as to Love. The book was published by the independent press Silverball.