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How is an athletes collapse and suffering transformed into myth? Where does performance end and media representation begin?

Frame Trial examines the fragile interval immediately after a professional cycling race—a temporal zone beginning the moment the rider crosses the finish line and ending when they disappear from the gaze of mass media.
The title refers both to the time-trial discipline and to the “trial by framing” that begins the instant the race is over. In this brief window, mass media compete to capture an emotionally definitive image, transforming exhaustion into spectacle and suffering into narrative material.

At the centre of the installation is a photogrammetric scan of a sculpture from Passo Ghisallo. Re-rendered in porcelain-like white, it merges victory and collapse into a single fragile form, echoing Roland Barthes’s notion that cycling’s mythic power lies in the tension between triumph and physical breakdown. Through abstraction, the sculpture no longer depicts a fixed event but a fluid state—hovering between endurance, speed, decay, and disappearance.

The installation also features two appropriated videos from the Tour de France Femmes, both depicting the same moment: the immediate aftermath of Demi Vollering’s time-trial ride. While the visual material remains closely related, the meaning of each video is significantly shaped by its accompanying text.

The first video combines a broadcast overview shot of Vollering surrounded by reporters with excerpts from Cycling and Cinema. These texts function as an impersonal, theoretical voice—cool, analytical, and detached. They frame suffering as the central condition of sporting meaning: not skill or strategy, but visible exhaustion is what the spectator ultimately demands. Pain is described as an icon, a guarantee of authenticity. Even doping is addressed not as a moral failure, but as an image problem—something that disrupts the legibility of suffering and denies the viewer their voyeuristic satisfaction. In direct relation to the image of the media crowd encircling a physically depleted body, the text does not merely comment on the situation; it actively legitimizes it. The rider appears less as an individual and more as a performer within a mythic narrative, whose body is required to carry meaning.

The second video introduces a radical shift in perspective. It focuses closely on Vollering’s face and is accompanied by a personal statement taken from her Instagram post, written in response to the same moment captured on camera. Here, the text speaks in the first person. Rather than analyzing suffering, it normalizes it as part of professional identity. Vollering reflects on the physical and psychological difficulty of having cameras and microphones pushed toward her immediately after extreme exertion, while simultaneously acknowledging this exposure as necessary for the visibility of women’s cycling. The text reveals an internalization of media logic: the rider recognizes herself not only as an athlete, but as an image, a representative body, and a public face of the sport.

Together, the two videos form a deliberate contrast. The first constructs myth from the outside; the second shows how that myth is consciously inhabited from within. This shift in textual voice profoundly affects the viewer. While the theoretical quotations justify and normalize voyeurism, the personal testimony introduces ethical discomfort, forcing the viewer to confront their own position within the process of framing.

Both videos are slowed down, edited into sequences, and projected on rotating holographic displays. The spinning motion evokes not only a bicycle wheel but also the relentless machinery of mass media, which continues to circulate and amplify the image long after the rider has crossed the finish line. This dual movement mirrors the rider’s suspended state—physically collapsed and not yet fully conscious—while the wheels of the race keep turning in the mediated narrative, transforming lived experience into spectacle.

The videos are additionally overlaid with a film frame counter, which begins at the exact moment the cameras first register the rider’s arrival. The counter marks the start of a new measurement: the time spent in front of the lens. Here, the time trial continues beyond the finish line. What is measured is no longer speed or distance, but duration of exposure—how long exhaustion can be observed, framed, and transformed into narrative value.

Studio portraits from the Prague velodrome extend this inquiry by depicting cyclists in the fragile interval immediately after their races, captured in a field studio setup. Within this controlled yet provisional space, it becomes possible to visually accentuate dramatic tension and to construct an expanded, individualized mythology of sport. By isolating the riders against a neutral background, the negative space directs the viewer’s attention entirely to the cyclist, allowing subtle details of expression, posture, and gesture to come to the fore. The careful observation of these details—where fatigue, alertness, and vulnerability intersect—makes visible the delicate boundary between authenticity and constructed intent, echoing strategies seen in Richard Avedon’s In the American West, where neutral settings and formal compositions elevate the subject to symbolic significance.

These portraits operate in tandem with the video works: they transform the ephemeral physical and emotional states of the athletes into a concentrated visual narrative, reinforcing the installation’s meditation on endurance, collapse, and myth-making. In the field studio, as on the velodrome itself, the act of framing—and, in the case of photography, the act of selecting what to include—becomes performative, actively shaping meaning.

Across all its components, Frame Trial exposes the mechanisms through which contemporary sport is transformed into mythology: a system in which bodily limits, repetition, and media circulation convert fleeting physical states into durable narratives. The rider’s suffering becomes a symbolic act, repeatedly framed, consumed, and re-inscribed as collective memory. In the charged interval between collapse and representation, power no longer belongs solely to the athlete or the observer, but to the frame itself—the mechanism that selects, measures, and stabilizes experience, converting lived reality into image, meaning, and myth.

The installation features a clay race-bike sculpture with a glossy finish, resting atop an asphalt strip, alongside two rotating holographic displays showing the footage in motion with brief text overlays. C-prints of cyclists from the Prague velodrome complete the setting, creating a hybrid environment between studio, archive, and racetrack.

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