Radenko Milak, Hotel Panama

In Hotel Panama (2025), Radenko Milak draws from a photograph published by The New York Times documenting the use of hotels in Panama as temporary holding spaces for migrants. Originally conceived as places of hospitality, these buildings become architectures of waiting, control, and uncertainty. Milak fragments the image into a grid of nocturnal views: illuminated windows, veiled interiors. The repetition of these scenes evokes both the structure of the building and the systems that regulate human movement, emphasizing a sense of suspension and confinement. Executed in watercolor, a medium associated with fragility and transience, the work slows down the immediacy of the news image and transforms it into a meditation on displacement, visibility, and the ambiguous nature of contemporary “temporary” spaces.