Tan Siuli: Violent Attachments Curator Tan Siuli speaks about Violent Attachments, the upcoming group show she is curating for Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore.
AUGUST 2020
Collectively, the artworks in this exhibition explore various notions of and around violence, in particular how mankind’s various attachments are ultimately violent, and how painful histories may be renegotiated, especially those in which violence has become a conditioned part of one’s identity. Adeela Suleman’s delicate miniatures posit violence as endemic, historical, and continuous. Her works draw on the artistic traditions and iconography of classical South Asian art, presenting aestheticised scenes of decapitated figures doing battle as a commentary on the volatile realities of life in contemporary Pakistan. With their references to Mughal painting – commonly feted as Pakistan’s crowning cultural achievement – her
works suggest an illustrious lineage of violence, and one that is embedded in the psyche of the people. Some of these images are served up on vintage dinner plates thrifted from Karachi’s markets, and beautifully framed as decorative vignettes that might decorate a domestic interior. The seepage of these scenes of violence into the home, as well as their aestheticisation, raises troubling questions about the spectacularisation of violence in contemporary media culture, as well as how violence might be rendered ‘palatable’ through representation, and made ‘acceptable’ to a desensitised audience as an intrinsic part of communal or national identity. As a philosophical counterpoint, Lindy Lee’s bronze sculpture is less direct in its invocation of violence, which manifests itself implicitly in the artist’s gesture of flinging molten metal. Here, ‘violence’ is an artistic expression reminiscent of the vitality of abstract expressionist painting as well as the tradition of ‘splashed ink’ paintings in Zen art. Left to chance, the uninscribed ink, paint, or liquid metal acquires its own agency, its seeming formlessness open to a multitude of interpretations. Read in proximity to Suleman’s vignettes, the splattered bronze on the wall mirrors the fountains of blood spurting from the decapitated figures; a visual echo of the clamor of steel on steel. At the same time, Lee’s work evokes an explosive splintering of form – perhaps that of a golden sun - suggesting the eventual decimation or end of life, as well as a ‘big bang’ heralding new beginnings in a cosmic cycle: an end to all things, as well as a coming into being. Much of the work of pioneering Indonesian artist FX Harsono has centered on redressing histories of violence, inflicted by an oppressive regime on the citizenry at large, as well as more insidious and state-sanctioned forms of
Eko Nugroho, Another Coalition #2, 2019, embroidered painting, 271 x 156 cm
Violent Attachments explores the deeply embedded nature of violence, and mankind’s conscious as well as subconscious attachment to violence in its myriad forms. The term has currency in both psychoanalytic and political theory: in 1992, Dr Reid Meloy’s publication of the same name looked at why so much of human violence occurred between people involved in an attachment paradigm. More recently, Dr Hagar Kotef’s similarly titled essay (2019) examined subject positions that are contingent on the exercising of violence on others, and how entire communities and political identities are sustained through these violent arrangements. These texts point to a painful recognition that violence – although widely deplored as abhorrent - may in fact be deeply ingrained in the human psyche, infiltrating our most intimate relationships as well as broader political and social relations. It shapes a sense of self or subjectivity, and the very notion of ‘attachments’ implies the inextricable psychological, social, as well as structural investment in forms of violence.
