While no one was watching, the game began.

In abandoned stages, beneath collapsed ceilings, at the end of rusted tracks—a child appears. A swing is built that refuses to fall. A sun is drawn in chalk across a crumbling floor. There is no sound, but there is play. And play, at its core, is the most primal form of resistance.

In this new series, Sidar Baki disrupts the aesthetics of ruin through the lens of the child. By placing small figures in vast, decaying architectural spaces, he transforms not only the meaning of the space, but our relationship to it. The children do not merely play—they reclaim, reimagine, and rebuild. Where the adult world has vanished, they remain—small, yet essential.

This, too, is political:

To reveal the unseen.

To give voice to the overlooked.

To trace the remnants of life in the heart of collapse.

The spaces in these paintings are not passive backgrounds; they are active agents of memory and critique. They whisper questions to the viewer:

— Why is this place empty?

— Who abandoned it?

— What does the child do here?

The answers are hidden within the brushstrokes. Because while no one was watching, the children dreamed.

When the world fell silent, they spoke. When the systems crumbled, they moved lightly through the ruins, leaving new meaning in their wake.

Sidar Baki, through the silent but transformative presence of children, follows the poetic, political, and deeply human traces of hope in spaces shaped by loss.

Because sometimes, the most profound transformations begin while no one was watching.