In MZ.34 (Pupassions), Monsieur Zohore remakes the Passion through the figure of the dog. Prosthetically transformed into a poodle, he drags a cruciform structure through a dog park, rerouting one of Western Christianity’s most canonized images of suffering through a site of leisure, sentiment, training, and bourgeois care. The substitution is funny only briefly. Very quickly, the dog clarifies a far more hostile social truth: the uneven distribution of tenderness, the moral prestige granted to the domesticated animal, and the humiliating conditions under which Blackness is permitted to appear lovable at all.

The dog park is a theater of managed freedom. Bodies circulate there under a regime of affection, etiquette, correction, and display. The dog may be dirty, noisy, unruly, or overadored without forfeiting its status as companion. By dragging the cross through that environment in the form of a pink poodle—a breed synonymous with grooming, ornament, elegance, feminization, and excess cultivation—Zohore places that affective economy under strain. The poodle becomes a figure of conditional acceptance: cherished because it has been trained, handled, and rendered decorative. Within that condition, the work begins to brush against a broader set of questions around race, likability, and institutional belonging. What kind of body is allowed to be loved through obedience? What kind of body remains exposed even at its most polished?

The video carries the project’s title with exactly the right combination of absurdity and pressure. Pupassions is melodramatic, ridiculous, and structurally exact. It condenses puppy, Passion, spectacle, and suffering into a single overblown linguistic event. As in much of Zohore’s practice, the joke is not ornamental. It is a vehicle sturdy enough to transport something otherwise unbearable. Here, canine sentiment becomes a route into sacrificial logic, and sacrifice becomes a way of measuring the distance between affection and protection. The work moves through that gap without resolving it.