CUT2010: New Photography from Southeast Asia [Parallel Universe]
curated by Eva McGovern
Participating artists: Agan Harahap, Eiffel Chong, Frankie Callaghan, Michael Shaowanasai, Mintio, Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu, Shooshie Sulaiman, Tanapol Kaewpring, Wawi Navarroza, Wimo Bayang, Zhao Renhui/The Institute of Critical Zoologists
Curator’s note on Birdprayers:
Birdprayers is an ongoing multi-site, multi-disciplinary project that combines performance, exhibitions and talks by artists Sara Nuytemans (The Netherlands) and Arya Pandjalu (Indonesia). It is a creative response to the weighty and seemingly impossible to resolve issue of religious conflict in the world. By representing four major world religions, Judaism, Catholicism, Hinduism and Islam the artists react and challenge competing (and at times inter) religious hegemonies locked in a never-ending debate of often bloody and polemical drama. However, although Birdprayers expresses the need for unity and peace, rather than being strictly utopian in focus, the project also highlights the difficult realities of such a goal through playful and sombre strategies. CUT2010 has selected photographic documentation of the ongoing performance strand of the project, titled All in the Mind as part of the exhibition.
Birdprayers is an ongoing multi-site, multi-disciplinary project that combines performance, exhibitions and talks by artists Sara Nuytemans (The Netherlands) and Arya Pandjalu (Indonesia). It is a creative response to the weighty and seemingly impossible to resolve issue of religious conflict in the world. By representing four major world religions, Judaism, Catholicism, Hinduism and Islam the artists react and challenge competing (and at times inter) religious hegemonies locked in a never-ending debate of often bloody and polemical drama. However, although Birdprayers expresses the need for unity and peace, rather than being strictly utopian in focus, the project also highlights the difficult realities of such a goal through playful and sombre strategies. CUT2010 has selected photographic documentation of the ongoing performance strand of the project, titled All in the Mind as part of the exhibition.
Four protagonists, in neutral costumes, wear models of each of the main houses of worship on top of their heads: a church, synagogue, mosque and Hindu temple. They walk through their surroundings and or position themselves as living monuments for viewers to be confused, amused and challenged. The images in CUT2010 represent five of the performances that have taken place so far in Bali, Yogyakarta, Istanbul, Rome and The Hague, but the photographs are now dislocated from their original context as a framing device for performance documentation. As such, the aesthetics of the images becomes a rhetorical device that is just as interesting as the thing it describes. It also contributes to the legacy of the project as both artwork and document.
The scenes are lush and compelling yet fractured with mystery and unanswered questions. The project as a whole confronts the physical and mental walls built by conservative notions surrounding the external ritualisation of mass religion and culture. The artists comment that these dividers affirm that each religion is its own world and when placed side by side, they literally represent parallel universes. Such a psychological underpinning prompts deep questions about faith and its function in contemporary society.
The scenes are lush and compelling yet fractured with mystery and unanswered questions. The project as a whole confronts the physical and mental walls built by conservative notions surrounding the external ritualisation of mass religion and culture. The artists comment that these dividers affirm that each religion is its own world and when placed side by side, they literally represent parallel universes. Such a psychological underpinning prompts deep questions about faith and its function in contemporary society.
Curatorial Essay on the exhibition: Through the looking glass
Photography, functions as a mirror for internal thoughts and external observations. This combination of knowledge and sensory stimulation has been said to communicate the ‘essential truths’ about the subject as well as romantic qualities that makes an image a profound window to the soul. But despite its position as a mechanism for truth – we are able to validate the existence of the subject because of photography’s accuracy far more easily than its painterly predecessor – it is nevertheless, a carefully composed theatre of images. What is being presented therefore, is a parallel universe. This is at once real and imagined: a world made up of technical shadow and framed physical substance.
CUT2010 actively pursues this duality as well as the cracks in between. It aims to examine the subtleties and extremes of the medium’s capabilities as well as the rich ideological concepts behind them. Taking the subversion of reality as a starting point, twelve practitioners from Southeast Asia have been selected to participate in the exhibition. Artists from Malaysia (Shooshie Sulaiman and Eiffel Chong), Singapore (Mintio and Zhao Renhui), Thailand (Michael Shaowanasai and Tanapol Kaewpring), Philippines (Wawi Navarroza and Frankie Callaghan) and Indonesia (Wimo Bayang, Agan Harahap, Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu) contribute their personal perspectives through new and recent work. Selected for their commitment and energy to practice, they were invited to respond and play with the theme of the exhibition in order to start a dialogue with their ongoing concerns as image-makers. In return they offer viewers elaborate works that contemplate politics, religion, scientific inquiry, mysterious sub-cultures, gender and cultural identity, as well as the urban and natural environment. Such a diverse focus naturally incorporates and embraces photography’s ability for story telling. Myths and make believe as well as personal hopes and social critique all emerge in intentional and unintentional narratives throughout the exhibition. But importantly, questions are also being presented for audiences to consider. In a contemporary world, increasingly dominated by media and cultural images, the exhibition asks: how does fine art photography in Southeast Asia interrogate the status of the medium and present an alternate stage for us to contemplate deeper issues about human existence? How can photography be critical and expressive at the same time?
The techniques of the photographic process are often taken for granted. At present, relatively sophisticated images can be created by the general public, and photographic images are everywhere. Therefore photography has become an increasingly affordable and democratised art form. This in itself is a positive thing, allowing many audiences outlets for creativity, but it also reduces photography to something that is part of mass production. PARALLEL UNIVERSE purposefully chooses aesthetically amplified images to highlight and rigorously consider the technical world of photography, in both film and digital production.
Appropriation and collage of found images from pop culture and history is a well known strategy in contemporary visual art. In photography, this method reveals that the image is not an impenetrable surface, but a fragile skin that can be subverted. Shooshie Sulaiman and Agan Harahap both seek found photography and employ processes of removal and interaction but through two very different strategies. One is physically reacting, covering and layering on to the surface to question racial/national identity whereas the other digitally reworks the very fabric of the image itself to play with the spectacle of war and super heroes. Frankie Callaghan, surprisingly, uses only the most delicate traces of processing to create heightened stages of urban beauty challenging the eye to believe if this is a ‘naturally’ produced image whereas Wawi Navarroza purposefully seeks epic fakeness in her constructed political tableau through meticulous post production methods. The utopian dreams of religious respect and understanding by Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu unintentionally comments on photography’s role in documentation, whose boundaries continue to blur. Here the image has the possibility to transcend the performance it reproduces to stand alone as an artwork in its own right. Does the photograph therefore reduce or amplify the power of this past event? How does it transform the legacy of a performative project, which in itself is a theatre of dreams?
Conceptually each photographer contributes carefully constructed perspectives that are often rooted in their cultural contexts. However, these in turn become departure points for universal human issues. Mintio’s concentrated faces of young Singaporean online gamers in front of their computer screens discuss a semi-sacred meeting place for psychological and virtual worlds. Here, any scenario is possible. This intense, global youth culture rejects the physical, for its own unique codes of conduct and rituals. Eiffel Chong presents another mysterious sub-culture based on obsession and fetish. Selecting the Japanese manga doll as his subject Chong monumentalises these small figurines to reveal the desires and beliefs projected onto them by their owners and participants as part of the fan(atic) culture that revolves around Japanese anime and comics. Zhao Renhui, as a photographer is cloaked in secrecy, as is his affiliation with the Institute of Critical Zoologists. Documenting mysterious expeditions and scientific research, all is not what it seems in images that analyse cultural ideals about nature through wildlife photography. The landscape feels both exotic and familiar at the same time. What do we choose to believe and reject?
Finally personal and public identity remains an important subject in Southeast Asian visual practice. The collision of the local and the global, of the past and the present creates many complex questions for artists to address. However, rather than be didactic, practitioners have embraced open ended and diverse strategies. This approach, which is often playful, illustrates that identity is a constantly fluctuating concept. Wimo Bayang parodies a well-known phrase about the Dutch during the colonial era in Indonesia. The images are not a warning but a humorous act of self-reclamation and independence from ties to past.Michael Shaowanasai, analyses the position of women in society. By placing himself as the central character in his work, he contributes his admiration and observations on the complexities of female identity more than just aspects of transvestite culture in Thailand.Tanapol Kaewpring, chooses the landscape as a more abstracted signifier for personal memory. Here the artist presents natural settings with a curious glass cube that traps untouchable elements like fire and smoke, a chamber of thoughts in environments of personal relevance.
Together this body of work forms its own parallel universe of images and concepts in the gallery. But what is a parallel universe? It is an imagined place or dreamscape based on an alternate notion of time and space, filled with memorable characters and elaborate scenes and narratives. This construct destabilises audiences who are attracted by haunting and beautiful signs that portray direct and subtle parables about the real world. By selecting the uncanny, or rather, what is familiar and foreign at the same time, the exhibition curatorially endeavours to create a necessary pause on photography as a medium, to discuss exactly what this window to the soul could be. Such theatrically tries to expand our imagination and curiosity, because like Alice, we all wonder at times what the world would be like if we step through the looking glass.
I would like to thank all the artists involved in this exhibition for their time, generosity of knowledge and commitment to the project.
CUT2010 actively pursues this duality as well as the cracks in between. It aims to examine the subtleties and extremes of the medium’s capabilities as well as the rich ideological concepts behind them. Taking the subversion of reality as a starting point, twelve practitioners from Southeast Asia have been selected to participate in the exhibition. Artists from Malaysia (Shooshie Sulaiman and Eiffel Chong), Singapore (Mintio and Zhao Renhui), Thailand (Michael Shaowanasai and Tanapol Kaewpring), Philippines (Wawi Navarroza and Frankie Callaghan) and Indonesia (Wimo Bayang, Agan Harahap, Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu) contribute their personal perspectives through new and recent work. Selected for their commitment and energy to practice, they were invited to respond and play with the theme of the exhibition in order to start a dialogue with their ongoing concerns as image-makers. In return they offer viewers elaborate works that contemplate politics, religion, scientific inquiry, mysterious sub-cultures, gender and cultural identity, as well as the urban and natural environment. Such a diverse focus naturally incorporates and embraces photography’s ability for story telling. Myths and make believe as well as personal hopes and social critique all emerge in intentional and unintentional narratives throughout the exhibition. But importantly, questions are also being presented for audiences to consider. In a contemporary world, increasingly dominated by media and cultural images, the exhibition asks: how does fine art photography in Southeast Asia interrogate the status of the medium and present an alternate stage for us to contemplate deeper issues about human existence? How can photography be critical and expressive at the same time?
The techniques of the photographic process are often taken for granted. At present, relatively sophisticated images can be created by the general public, and photographic images are everywhere. Therefore photography has become an increasingly affordable and democratised art form. This in itself is a positive thing, allowing many audiences outlets for creativity, but it also reduces photography to something that is part of mass production. PARALLEL UNIVERSE purposefully chooses aesthetically amplified images to highlight and rigorously consider the technical world of photography, in both film and digital production.
Appropriation and collage of found images from pop culture and history is a well known strategy in contemporary visual art. In photography, this method reveals that the image is not an impenetrable surface, but a fragile skin that can be subverted. Shooshie Sulaiman and Agan Harahap both seek found photography and employ processes of removal and interaction but through two very different strategies. One is physically reacting, covering and layering on to the surface to question racial/national identity whereas the other digitally reworks the very fabric of the image itself to play with the spectacle of war and super heroes. Frankie Callaghan, surprisingly, uses only the most delicate traces of processing to create heightened stages of urban beauty challenging the eye to believe if this is a ‘naturally’ produced image whereas Wawi Navarroza purposefully seeks epic fakeness in her constructed political tableau through meticulous post production methods. The utopian dreams of religious respect and understanding by Sara Nuytemans and Arya Pandjalu unintentionally comments on photography’s role in documentation, whose boundaries continue to blur. Here the image has the possibility to transcend the performance it reproduces to stand alone as an artwork in its own right. Does the photograph therefore reduce or amplify the power of this past event? How does it transform the legacy of a performative project, which in itself is a theatre of dreams?
Conceptually each photographer contributes carefully constructed perspectives that are often rooted in their cultural contexts. However, these in turn become departure points for universal human issues. Mintio’s concentrated faces of young Singaporean online gamers in front of their computer screens discuss a semi-sacred meeting place for psychological and virtual worlds. Here, any scenario is possible. This intense, global youth culture rejects the physical, for its own unique codes of conduct and rituals. Eiffel Chong presents another mysterious sub-culture based on obsession and fetish. Selecting the Japanese manga doll as his subject Chong monumentalises these small figurines to reveal the desires and beliefs projected onto them by their owners and participants as part of the fan(atic) culture that revolves around Japanese anime and comics. Zhao Renhui, as a photographer is cloaked in secrecy, as is his affiliation with the Institute of Critical Zoologists. Documenting mysterious expeditions and scientific research, all is not what it seems in images that analyse cultural ideals about nature through wildlife photography. The landscape feels both exotic and familiar at the same time. What do we choose to believe and reject?
Finally personal and public identity remains an important subject in Southeast Asian visual practice. The collision of the local and the global, of the past and the present creates many complex questions for artists to address. However, rather than be didactic, practitioners have embraced open ended and diverse strategies. This approach, which is often playful, illustrates that identity is a constantly fluctuating concept. Wimo Bayang parodies a well-known phrase about the Dutch during the colonial era in Indonesia. The images are not a warning but a humorous act of self-reclamation and independence from ties to past.Michael Shaowanasai, analyses the position of women in society. By placing himself as the central character in his work, he contributes his admiration and observations on the complexities of female identity more than just aspects of transvestite culture in Thailand.Tanapol Kaewpring, chooses the landscape as a more abstracted signifier for personal memory. Here the artist presents natural settings with a curious glass cube that traps untouchable elements like fire and smoke, a chamber of thoughts in environments of personal relevance.
Together this body of work forms its own parallel universe of images and concepts in the gallery. But what is a parallel universe? It is an imagined place or dreamscape based on an alternate notion of time and space, filled with memorable characters and elaborate scenes and narratives. This construct destabilises audiences who are attracted by haunting and beautiful signs that portray direct and subtle parables about the real world. By selecting the uncanny, or rather, what is familiar and foreign at the same time, the exhibition curatorially endeavours to create a necessary pause on photography as a medium, to discuss exactly what this window to the soul could be. Such theatrically tries to expand our imagination and curiosity, because like Alice, we all wonder at times what the world would be like if we step through the looking glass.
I would like to thank all the artists involved in this exhibition for their time, generosity of knowledge and commitment to the project.
About the Curator
Eva McGovern is an independent curator and writer based in Kuala Lumpur. Prior to living in South East Asia, she worked at the Serpentine Gallery, a public contemporary art institution in London on public programmes, exhibitions and publications. In 2009, she curated the group show Unconscious: Self: Conscious_Portraiture in 21st Century Malaysia, at 67 Tempinis Satu Gallery, Kuala Lumpur and works by Indonesian and Malaysian artists as part of the group show Some Rooms, Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. She also wrote and edited the catalogue Bank Negara Malaysia Art Collection: Selected Works. Eva has guest lectured at the Sotheby’s Institute, Singapore and has contributed to international journals on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art and is Managing Editor for www.arterimalaysia.com.
Eva McGovern is an independent curator and writer based in Kuala Lumpur. Prior to living in South East Asia, she worked at the Serpentine Gallery, a public contemporary art institution in London on public programmes, exhibitions and publications. In 2009, she curated the group show Unconscious: Self: Conscious_Portraiture in 21st Century Malaysia, at 67 Tempinis Satu Gallery, Kuala Lumpur and works by Indonesian and Malaysian artists as part of the group show Some Rooms, Osage Gallery, Hong Kong. She also wrote and edited the catalogue Bank Negara Malaysia Art Collection: Selected Works. Eva has guest lectured at the Sotheby’s Institute, Singapore and has contributed to international journals on Southeast Asian Contemporary Art and is Managing Editor for www.arterimalaysia.com.
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