Which Artworks Visually Reinterpret The Myth Of Sisyphus Today?

I’m the sort of fan who sees Sisyphus in a lot of modern things — not only in galleries but in pop culture. For a compact list I usually point people to a few places: the film 'Groundhog Day' for the narrative loop, the essay 'The Myth of Sisyphus' for the philosophical backbone, and games like 'Returnal' or 'Dark Souls' for interactive versions of repeated struggle. On the contemporary art side, endurance performances (Marina Abramović’s work) and long-loop video installations frequently rework the myth visually, while street artists and GIF-makers condense it into a humorous but painful meme.

I find that music and collaborative projects sometimes take a Sisyphean route too — the band named 'Sisyphus' played with repetition and layered motifs in ways that felt fitting — and choreographers who repeat a motion until it frays emotionally are essentially reenacting the myth with bodies. When I teach a friend about this, I ask them to notice anything that repeats without obvious progress: that’s your modern Sisyphus, and spotting it can be oddly comforting.

Walking through a contemporary art museum on a rainy afternoon, I kept spotting the Sisyphus pattern: repetition, futile labor, and the strangely triumphant insistence to keep going. The obvious literary touchstone is Albert Camus' essay 'The Myth of Sisyphus', and its tone bleeds into a surprising number of visual and performative works — not always by name, but by mood. In galleries you'll see endurance pieces by artists whose practice is literally about repeating a gesture until the viewer starts to feel the weight: prolonged performances in the vein of Marina Abramović (think of the exhausted patience in 'The Artist Is Present'), or video installations that loop the same small catastrophe over and over. Those pieces make the viewer feel like the boulder itself, which is a neat inversion I love noticing in person.

Outside museums, film and games have taken the myth and dressed it in modern clothes. 'Groundhog Day' is the go-to cinematic reinterpretation, turning Sisyphean repetition into comic existentialism. In games, titles like 'Returnal' and the 'Dark Souls' series capture the same rhythm: you fail, you get up, you try again, and in the trying you build meaning. 'Death Stranding' fascinates me because it literalizes repetitive delivery work — you carry loads across bleak landscapes, and the effort becomes a kind of moral labor. Even street art or GIF loops on social media riff on the same motif: a tiny figure pushing at something that always slips back, which is such a great visual shorthand for modern grind culture.

I also love when sculptors and new-media artists flip the story: some create monumental, immovable stones and instead show people choosing to keep pushing, or set up mechanical systems (treadmills, conveyor belts) that both automate and satirize the effort. Contemporary photographers and performance artists often use daily tasks — commuting, wage labor, caregiving — as Sisyphean stand-ins, which is why the myth feels so current: it's not just about punishment, it's about endurance, ritual, and small rebellions. If you want a fun deep dive, track down exhibitions that pair older myth-inspired works with recent video installations; seeing them in dialogue makes the recurring image of the boulder feel like a mirror to our own repetitive habits.