Fyerool Darma with Aleezon, Sharmini Aphrodite, berukera featuring Eric Flower, 'Pathfinder', 2023, shaped plywood, vinyl acrylic (vinylfarbe; Lefranc & Bourgeois), printed polycotton on reupholstered camping chairs with pigments and coating (Samurai2K), 7mil polyester film, LED light, sound, installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and NTU ADM Gallery.
(Guided by and departing from the ideas of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Mieke Bal,) this exhibition reckons with artmaking as a practice of thinking. How does art think about other art? And about narrative? And about time?
Artworks tell stories, sometimes, and sometimes these stories are taken from elsewhere: from other artworks, from literary sources, from the media or from movies. Narratives are transformed by sliding between makers and gliding between different historical moments and political contexts. What kind of image-thinking happens during these processes?
Perhaps we can think of artworks as unfaithful responses to and adaptations of literary and artistic precedents. Perhaps the experience of time in artworks is not linear or cyclical, but instead like an octopus whose tentacles reach into every dimension. These tentacles encircle stories, transforming them into thought-images and devouring them.
The artworks in this exhibition comprise film and moving image, sound and installation, painting and text, seating and embroidery. They respond to sources including classical Thai poetry adapted from Javanese folk talks, and media images of the ongoing Ukraine war (for Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook), Greek mythology and Italian baroque painting (for Mieke Bal), Spanish plays adapted from other Spanish plays (for Ricardo de Baños and Alberto Marro), CCTV surveillance footage from a mall built on the site of a bombing (for CAMP), a 1938 Thai novel and its many cinematic versions (for Chulayarnnon Siriphol), the acoustic and poetic works of a nearly-forgotten historical figure from Johor Bahru recorded in 1917 and stored in a Berlin sound archive (for Fyerool Darma), a modular, abstract chair based on modular, abstract sculptures (for Thao Nguyen Phan’s remaking of designs by Diem Phung Thi), and a 1979 Chinese animation based on a novel that adapts ancient mythological tales that are Indic in origin (for Ian Tee).
This is an excerpt from Roger Nelson’s curatorial essay published on the occasion of ‘The Unfaithful Octopus’.
The exhibition is on view from 12 October to 1 December 2023 at ADM Gallery, Singapore, and thereafter will travel to MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai in early 2024.
