I am Julia, a Hungarian emerging artist.
I started thinking about the way women are looked at — how often we are reduced to something that exists to be owned, to be consumed. How the body devours the person. I have felt this countless times in my own life: the fear, the discomfort, the anger of being objectified. Moments when I didn’t feel equal, when I felt reduced to something smaller than who I am.
Too many times I have had to be afraid. Afraid of comments, of situations, of the possibility that simply existing in my body could put me at risk. And I find it profoundly unjust that this is something women grow up learning to live with. Men, with respect to the exceptions, are not followed, not hunted, not drugged, not reduced to disgusting remarks, and they don’t have to fear that the person they go on a date with might harm them.
We as women have to stand together. It is not by accident that in so many situations we are more attentive, more supportive, more protective of each other — we know what the other might be going through because we have felt it on our own skin. There is a reason women walk each other home. There is a reason it is not women who are escorted for safety on the bus.
I created this clock because I am tired. Tired of fear. Tired of being made to feel like an object.
As time passes, the first signs appear — wrinkles, cellulite, change. And suddenly, in the eyes of society, our value seems to decrease, as if worth were measured by desirability based on the ideal. I have seen it around me and experienced it myself: women losing perceived value with age, as if natural change erased who we are. The focus stays on the surface while the inner world, the real self, is ignored. But our true identity is not our face or our body. It is our mind and our soul.
Time does not take away our value. It gives value.
This is why it became a clock. Not a table, not a sculpture, not decoration. Because every minute is a reminder that objectification is not an abstract issue for the future. It is happening now. And it must end now.
I have also lived the quiet erasure — moments when my opinion was overlooked, only to be validated the second a man repeated the same words. These experiences accumulate. They shape how we move through the world, how loudly we speak, how safe we feel.
This piece is not only anger. It is refusal.
Refusal to be reduced.
Refusal to be silent.
We all deserve equality. We deserve to exist without fear, without being measured, without being diminished by time.
Fuck objectification. All of it.
