8 minute read
Artworks
habibi, a video of a performance, works in dialog with “the dancing boys” or “Bacha Bazi,” an entertainment culture in South Asia (mostly Afghanistan and Pakistan) which are referenced in reports, documentaries, novels and films, and are discussed in relation to the issue of human trafficking, homosexuality, gender inequality, and religious discourses. This video work reflects the contradictions of the male gaze vis-a-vis the imagined male effeminacy and form of desire in religious subjectivities. This performance of “Bacha Bazi” by Manawat Promrat, a queer Muslim both explores and exposes their body as material culture.
Meanwhile, brotherhood presents Muslim sarongs collected from the young queer men of Nakon Sri Thammarat, a southern province of Thailand where many Islamic schools are located. Their sarongs are cut and put together to reflect the intimacy of their brotherhood and allude to sexual desires in their homosocial circles. The fragments of sarong are juxtaposed and connected by their edges. The texts in Arabic are translated confessions of Kosem’s being queer. Muslims believe that objects return alive in the next world as witnesses of human sin and merit, and that the only language that God converses with is Arabic. 16
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habibi 2021 Video 7 min 35 sec
brotherhood 2021 Framed sarong (3) 85 × 60 cm
Pastrana shows two works both completed in 2017. Paperweight is a starfish made out of soil, water, and a little blood from the artist, sitting on top of a pile of A4 sheets. The stack of paper is composed of printouts of research involving a basic google search of the key components of the starfish sculpture: star, fish, water, blood, soil (and other related words). The results of this research are saved, printed, and added to the stack. The work is accumulative, each presentation of the work adds to the archive of search results that form a pedestal for the paperweight or else a dense bibliography that also speculates and elaborates on the work.
Fellen is a wilted flower created using human skin, from the petal to the twig to the leaves. Pastrana collected skin from a friend who has a condition that makes them produce excess skin. To complete the work, Pastrana asked a professional make-up artist to render the flower more realistic. The resulting object is a delicate flower made of skin. Fellen 2017 Skin, glue, make up and acrylic box 50 × 50 × 15 cm
Paperweight 2017 Starfish made out of soil, water, artist’s blood on top of A4 sheets Dimensions variable 21
Quinto’s two projects examine the life and afterlife of objects, and how these correlate with intimacy and the body. The gradual growth of longing takes the form of Longing Vessel. With the death of the object through a ceramic fossilizing process, the artist queries if its life cycle could be reincarnated into a living sculpture that would need tending to. The stewardship of the piece becomes akin to the care of the self and the care of another. So-called Biological Clock, meanwhile, touches on the pressures on women to settle down by a certain age. This idea of the “completeness” of womanhood as being contingent upon motherhood, is questioned since not all women choose to or are able to subscribe to these expectations.
Transference explores notions of limbic bonding, social synapse, and mingling bodies. What parts of ourselves are truly and wholly ours? What parts of ourselves came from others and vice versa? The project explores the soul ties formed in acts of intimacy and the fallout we experience as being likened to gluing pieces of wood and ripping them apart. Something happens to the synapses in our brains as we form emotional bonds and we are never really left completely the same afterwards, even in casual trysts. Longing Vessel 2021 Land moss on stoneware 23 × 16.5 × 3 cm
So-called Biological Clock 2021 Giclée print on Hahnemühle photo rag 30 × 40 cm
Transference 2021 Video; Wood, latex paint, and wood glue Dimensions variable 4 min 30 sec
Our bodies will have kept score 2021 Giclée print on Hahnemühle photo rag 40 × 23 cm 23
The newly commissioned video work is inspired by the late conceptual artist David Medalla (1938–2020) and his participatory work A Stitch in Time. For this work, Salvatus stitches together video clips found in his hard drive, CD-R, DVD-R that he has accumulated since 2007 (never shown in public). The video becomes material, souvenir, memory. In editing the videos together, the personal is blurred. The time of the pandemic becomes auspicious as the time to dig in and reflect and to stitch time as the present. 24
See Saw, ACT 1 (The Seed) 2021 Video 10 min 50 sec
Autofiguration is a negotiation between the trans body and the gender normative reality within which it exists. In this work, a planar form, symbolic of conventions and presuppositions, is apportioned, seamed, and sutured. In its collapse, the trans body presents itself as a mode and framework of abstraction that seizes and rules its configurations. The structure’s failure, fracture, and reliance on the trans body inspect a paradoxical potentiality where wholeness can refuse dogma and fixity. 26
Autofiguration 2021 Textile installation, archival print on paper Dimensions variable
Household casebearers (Phereoeca spp.) accrue dust and refashion it into building blocks for their own protective cases. Combining Greek words “phero” (bearer) and “oikos” (house), the scientific name “Phereoeca” readily reveals the creature’s habit of towing its house as it rubs against the pull of gravity. Bearing the weight of its home, it moves about our home, feeding on cobwebs, dead arthropods, our sloughed-off skin and hair. It gathers dust. Dust is destiny. Dust accumulates as time passes; dust is where life returns to; dust is the afterlife of all forms of life. The cases composed by household casebearer larvae epitomise the contingency of dust in mediating form and life. The nondescript appearance of dust betokens a theory of everything under the influence of time. Ever errant and promiscuous, dust tickles our anthropocentric insistence on distinguishing treasure from thrash, life from death, form from formlessness. Juxtaposing a speck of dust and a static panel of light, The Light When Dust Settles (2021) is a vision of a portal between worlds: a world where dust gathers and accumulates, vis-à-vis a world that requires no dusting, static and digital. It mulls over what light exposes and what dust absorbs; how clarity is reached or muddled through our micro rituals of lighting and dusting. 28
The Light When Dust Settles 2021 Gold-dusted casebearer, magnified stitched SEM image of casebearer Dimensions variable 29
In this iteration of Forest of Agencies, Tong imagines the urban forest not only as a site of resistance, but also as an explorative locus of intersubjective intimacies. Taking cue from the Ecosexual Manifesto written by sexecologists Elizabeth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle, the artist meditates on the sensuous morphologies of the forest as a phenomenological skinship between human and nonhuman agencies. A haptic ecological lovemaking as one of the highest forms of environmental love, an interpenetration of forms of senses as a form of queer communion. The focus of this installation is the phallic detritus of the fruits of the fire tree (Delonix regia (Hook.) Raf) found in the Arroceros Forest Park. The tree is native to Madagascar and was introduced to the Philippines during the Spanish regime around the 16th to 17th century. During the colonial times it was called “Arbol del fuego” and in recent times, “Fire Tree” or “Flame of the forest.” In the Philippines, a flamboyant inflorescence of crimson and orange signals the “comings” of the “wet” monsoon. The detritus of the legumes the she has collected thus signals an immanent arrival of rain and seasonal wetness. Florophilia 2021 Ghillie suit, intermedia installation Dimensions variable
The two works speak to the rapid changes in the urban landscape of Kuala Lumpur. In Keep a Distance buildings made of gauze appear to be sinking. The high-rise buildings are growing too fast. There is lesser space in the city, it even feels hard to breathe.
In recent years, everyone has realized the need to protect historical buildings and sites. While some of the buildings are protected what is surprising is that the environment around these historical sites have been transformed into gentrified and trendy environs where high-rise buildings have dwarfed these heritage sites, highlighting the discrepancies between these two aspects of urban life. We need to realize that we do not only need to protect the buildings, we also need to protect the environment of the buildings. If the environment surrounding the buildings is destroyed, it is equivalent to this monument being submerged and dying. The artworks presented in this exhibition focus on the contradiction, awkwardness, and the strangeness of the situation that these old buildings are embedded in by playing with the size and scale of these installations. Keep a Distance (I–V) 2021 Embroidery on gauze, gauze dyed in acrylic (5) 130 × 20 cm
The Floating Island 2020 Embroidery on gauze, gauze dyed in acrylic 128 × 80 cm 34