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OONA: 7 Years of CCTV Love Letters End in a Wedding

OONA built Dear David from London Underground footage of herself and her emails with the man who sends it. After a wedding with an empty altar, The Ceremony closes all 8 chapters on Tezos.

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Since 2019, the anonymous performance artist OONA has been performing for the cameras of the London Underground, then legally requesting the footage. It started at King's Cross while she was studying at Central Saint Martins. On an early request she put the wrong date on the form, and David, the Transport for London CCTV data manager who handles them, wrote back: "Dear so-and-so, sorry, we can't seem to find your footage." She has emailed him directly ever since, more than 400 emails by Sleek's count, though the 2 have never met.

That correspondence became Dear David: A Surveillance Love Story, a series of video love letters made entirely from her own CCTV footage, curated by Anika Meier for The Second-Guess. The first, Dear David: A Love Letter, took shape after an invitation to Body Anxiety in the Age of AI, online at HEK Basel. The series has since been shown at the V&A and at OOR Studio's Schlachter 151 in Berlin, and it is a 2026 Lumen Prize finalist in Systems & Structures.

The 8th and final chapter was a wedding. On October 16, during Frieze week, OONA walked down the aisle at Shoreditch Arts Club in a surveillance wedding dress, with a working camera ring in place of a wedding ring and live cameras filming the room. David was an empty space at the altar. His vows promised to record, safeguard and know more; hers promised that only he would know her true identity. She closed with "In sickness and surveillance."

On October 28, The Ceremony: OONA & David, 2 videos from the performance, came out on objkt and ended the series. All 8 chapters now live on Tezos, so the footage she once had to ask for is released on her own terms. "Did I really marry a man? Did I marry a camera? A machine? Or my art?" she posted on October 27. Her verdict, to Sleek: "They say love is blind. David sees everything."

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