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A beast, a god, and a line

Curated by Cosmin Costinas

A beast, a god, and a line was woven by connections and circulations of ideas across a geography with Bengal at its core. This geography - arbitrary as any mapping - is commonly called the Asia-Pacific, but it could also be defined by several other definitions, which this exhibition explored and untangled.


The issues summoned aimed to mark the current historical moment. Perhaps the most visible among these is the development and spread of politicised religion and its structures: Salafi Islam across several countries, extremist Buddhism in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, Hindu ethno-fascism in India, and revivalist Christianity among many indigenous communities in the Philippines, to name just a few examples in the region. In close connection to politicised religion is the rising tide of populism and nationalism across continents. These are all intimately connected to a generalised loss of confidence in the ideals and certainties of Western liberal democracy, and to rising alternatives and challenges to the liberal consensus, often based on various attempts to create parallel narratives to Western modernity.


Western hegemony was also challenged from a fundamentally different premise, that of unfinished processes of decolonisation and resurgent Indigenous identities, which were reflected both in the subject matter and in the aesthetic choices of several exhibited artists. Throughout the exhibition, artists investigated traces of colonial domination, as well as the different ramifications of that hegemony today, when cultural and environmental genocides continue to unravel landscapes, communities, and worlds.


These broad stories circulate across South and Southeast Asia on routes going back several historical eras, the first being the early Austronesian world that has woven a maritime universe surpassed in scale only by European colonialism, from the Pacific to Madagascar, with Taiwan as its origin and Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines at its core – which was taken as the speculative and approximate geographical perimeter of this exhibition. These historical journeys also served as an introduction to a major political reality that defines many contexts today and is often manipulated by the rising nationalist discourses: the contemporary waves of migration and refugee crises. 


This exhibition questioned how we should negotiate common ground in the context of the overall political and ideological fragmentation discussed above. How can an aesthetic basis for the language of contemporary art be maintained if the ideological bases of contemporary art are questioned? How can positions that claim disparate and conflicting genealogies sit together in a shared exhibition space? One tenuous leading line across the different aspects of this exhibition were textiles. A material and language common to different cultural spaces, textiles also have a firmly routed history in art, being possible sites for parallel processes of historiography. Moreover, textiles hold a different position in negotiating relationships with places and contexts, in ways that the individual agency of artists escapes.


While this exhibition included artists and practices of various historical, cultural, and geographical contexts, it was not based on an ethos of discovering or introducing artists from presumably marginalised regions, but worked within the premise of an already fragmentary and decentralised art world.



Ampannee Satoh

(b. 1983 in Pattani; lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand)

Lost Motherland (2016)

Pigment print on paper

Courtesy of the artist


The work addresses the recent history of forced migrations of Muslims, from Myanmar and Syria to the artist’s native Pattani, a Muslim majority region in Southern Thailand, where an insurgency has been taken place for more than a decade. Satoh attempts to capture the sense of displacement and alienation that accompanies exile, imbuing her photographs with a feeling of loss. The figures in her photographs seem gathered to mourn a collective pain, standing as mute witnesses to tragedy.


Anand Patwardhan

(b.1950 in Mumbai, India; lives and works in Mumbai)

We Are Not Your Monkeys (1997)

Video

Courtesy of the artist


This music video was jointly composed by the filmmaker along with renowned poets Daya Pawar and poet-singer Sambhaji Bhagat, giving a Dalit/indigenous perspective to the Hindu epic Ramayana. After German indologists in the 19th century created the myth of an Aryan invasion of the Indian sub-continent by a superior race and hailed the Vedic (Brahminical) period as representing a Golden Era in Indian history, many upper caste Indians felt proud to be considered the racial equivalent of the white man. At the same time those who questioned both race and caste began looking at what may have existed in the region before the Aryans supposedly arrived. The Ramayana itself, composed in the ancient Brahminic period in praise of Lord Rama, depicts characters who reveal traces of a pre-Aryan culture that was subjugated. The song and the film We Are Not Your Monkeys is a subaltern reading of history that uses poetic license (like the Ramayana did) to turn the Ramayana epic on its head.





Anida Yoeu Ali

(b.1974 in Battambang, lives and works in Phnom Penh, Cambodia)

From right to left:

Secret Lagoon (2014)

Coconut Road (2012)

Campus Dining (2012)

Roll Call (2014)

Sun-dried Landing #1 (2014)

On the River (2013)


From the Buddhist Bug Series

Digital c-print

Courtesy of the artist


The work is an ongoing project encompassing performance and photography, mapping interfaith relations between the Muslim minority to which the artist belongs and the Buddhist majority in her native Cambodia, against the background of the rise of Buddhist fundamentalism in Southeast Asia. Ali devises a seemingly magical creature (alluding to the religious myths of Islam, Buddhism, as well as the traditional animistic beliefs of the region) that occupies spaces of community gatherings, such as canteens and sites of prayer, rendering these ordinary activities surreal. 





Apichatpong Weerasethakul

 (b. 1970 in Bangkok, lives and works in

Chiang Mai, Thailand)

Chai Siris 

(b. 1983 in Bangkok, lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand)


Dilbar (2013)

Single-Channel Video Installation, suspended glass pane

Courtesy of the artist and the Sharjah Art Foundation

Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation


The work is an affectionate portrait of Dilbar, a Bangladeshi construction worker in the UAE, whose name means 'full of hearts’. Throughout the work he is seen to be asleep, while the viewer is mesmerised by the pace of the video and its light spilling over the edges of the screen. His sleeping is a gentle yet clear act of defiance to the logic of workers exploitation. There are over two million Bangladeshi workers currently living in the Gulf countries.





Apichatpong Weerasethakul

(b. 1970 in Bangkok, lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand)


Photophobia 1-4 (2013)

Photo etching and Chine-collé

Courtesy of the artist


The work is based on photographs documenting scenes of violence taken during the Takbai Incident in Thailand’s restive South in 2004. Around 1,500 demonstrators had gathered before the local police station to protest the detention of six men, only to be brutally repressed, resulting in 85 deaths. The photographs reveal the violence with which the Thai government has been handling insurgents and civilians alike in its Muslim-majority southern provinces. 



Art Labor Collective

Thao-Nguyen Phan 

(b. 1987 in Ho Chih Minh City, lives and works in Ho Chih Minh City, Vietnam)


Truong Cong Tung 

(b.1986 in Dak Lak, lives and works in Ho Chih Minh City, Vietnam)


Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran 

(b.1987 in Berlin, lives and works in Ho Chih Minh City)


In collaboration with Rocham Djeh, Rolan Loh, Siu Lon, Rahlan Aleo, Kpuih Gloh and Rocham Jeh 


Jrai Dew Sculpture Garden (2016-ongoing)

Wood sculptures, mural

Commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation, Para Site and

Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie.


Art Labor Collective works within different communities, bringing in practitioners from diverse disciplines such as medicine, film-making, education, to bring to questions ideas of labour and social practice. The Jrai Dew Sculpture Garden is part of an ongoing series of sculptural presentations realized in collaboration with the Jrai Dew community of the highlands of central Vietnam, where Art Labor collective member Cong Tung hails from. The project takes inspiration from Jrai spiritual beliefs of the transfiguration of the human after death. In the Jrai philosophy, humans go through many cycles of existence, where the final stage is to transform into dew (ia ngôm in Jrai language) evaporating into the environment – the state of non-being –signaling the beginning particles of new existence.





Charles Lim


(b. 1973 in Singapore, lives and works in Singapore)


Stealing the Trapeze (2016)

Video installation, books

Courtesy of the artist

With support of National Arts Council Singapore



Catamarans were seldom constructed in the temperate West before the 19th century, but they were in wide use as early as the 5th century CE in what is today Southern India. The word ‘catamaran’ is derived from the Tamil language (from kattu ‘to tie’ and maram ‘wood, tree’). In England, one of the earliest mentions of the ‘catamaran’ is made by the 17th century adventurer Willian Dampier who encountered this peculiar manner of relating to water when he reached south-eastern India during this first circumnavigation of the globe. The outrigger and catamaran was prevalent from equatorial South to Southeast Asia (including the artist’s native Singapore) and well into the Pacific as a design solution to stabilise and allow for narrow hull shapes which drew shall drafts. They were the primary vehicles that made the first migrations of Austronesian people to the islands of the Pacific possible. Today, the catamaran is raced in the America’s Cup. The artist, a former Olympic sailor, recounts how in his studies years he came across the autobiographical accounts by one Peter Scott about the circumstances surrounding the invention of the sailing trapeze. Scott claims that he and his fellow sailors invented the trapeze in 1938 along the Thames River in England. Peter Scott was the son of Robert Falcon Scott (the explorer who perished in the Antarctic) and sculpture Kathleen Scott. In his last letter to his wife, Robert Scott is said to have written, “make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than the game”. 





Cian Dayrit

(b. 1989 in Manila, lives and works in Manila, Philippines)


Feudal Fields (2018)

Mixed media and embroidery on canvas

Courtesy of the artist


Mapa de la Isla de Buglas (2017)

Mixed media and embroidery on canvas

Courtesy of the artist and Tin-aw Art Gallery


Taking as the point of departure the 2004 Hacienda Luisita Massacre, when protesting farmers and workers of the sugar estate were killed by agents of the Cojuangco family, these tapestry maps look into the role of sugar production in the country’s colonial past up to the neocolonial and neoliberal present as well as the country’s part in the global market as producers of raw material and consumer of excess goods including culture and education. Addressing feudalism and landlessness by pointing out ownership via imperialist interests and bureaucrat capitalist landlords within the format of a fabric map which functioned historically as nomadic murals brought to one colonized state to another by warrior-kings.





Daniel Boyd

(b. 1982 in Cairns, Queensland, lives and works in Sydney, Australia)


WTEIA2 (2017)

Oil, archival glue on canvas

Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney


WTEIA2 (2017)

Oil, archival glue on canvas

Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney


WTEIA3 (2017)

Oil, oil pastel, archival glue on linen

Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney


These paintings reference the stick-charts of the Marshall Islands, which were used by indigenous communities to navigate the sea by mapping the positions of islands as well as patterns of swell and disturbance in the water. These charts were not taken aboard during voyages, but rather memorized in advance by the sailors. Boyd, who is of Australian indigenous heritage, as well as a descendant of a Vanuatu slave forcibly taken to Australia, alludes through these paintings to the many modes of navigating land and sea that existed in the Pacific region. These forms of navigational knowledge were erased by colonialism, and replaced with the unidirectional model of the map, used primarily as an instrument of control.





Dilara Begum Jolly

(b. 1960 in Chittagong, lives and works in Chittagong, Bangladesh)


The War that Never Went Away (2016-2017)

Pierced photographs

Courtesy of the artist


The work revisits traumatic histories of the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971. The artist pierces holes in photographs of the Physical Training College of Dhaka, which was used as a site of torture of Bangladeshi freedom fighters by the Pakistani army during the conflict. Through this work, she traces histories of trauma, examining what she terms the haunting of history in the present.





Garima Gupta

(b. 1985 in New Delhi, lives and works in Bengaluru, India)


Cabinets of Curiosity (2017)

Home 02 (2017)

Lesser Bird of Paradise in a Vitrine (2017)

Hunting Implements from Huon Peninsula, Papua New Guinea (2017)

Twelve-wired Bird of Paradise (2017)

Hunting Implements from Arfak Mountains, West Papua (2017)

Home 01 (2017)

Kombayorong Dance (2017)

Two Studies of a Broken Mountain (2017)

Magnificent Riflebird (2017)


Giclee print on cotton paper

Courtesy of the artist and Tarq, Mumbai


Jakarta Markets (2017)

Red Bird of Paradise (2017)

Lesser Bird of Paradise (2017)

Chinese Taro (2017)


Giclee print on cotton paper

Courtesy of the artist and Tarq, Mumbai


Hamas? (2017)

Charcoal on Manjar-Pat cotton cloth

Courtesy of the artist and Tarq, Mumbai


The work is an ongoing journalistic and archival research in the island of New Guinea,examining

the wildlife trade in Southeast Asia and its effects on the communities and ecology of the island. The core focus of this body of work is the Bird of Paradise, an avian species endemic to New Guinea with a long history as the embodiment of the exotic in European colonial imagination. The research casts light on the socio-economic history of the erstwhile trade which spanned from New Guinea to Europe and traces its effect on the contemporary state of wildlife trafficking in Southeast Asia.





Idas Losin

(b. 1976, in Taiwan; lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan)


Traveler (2014)

Rano Raraku (2014)

Moai (2014)

Island (2014)

Ku (2017)

Oil on canvas

Courtesy of the artist


The artist’s background, belonging to the Truku and Atayal aboriginal people of Taiwan is an an important aspect of her work. The Austronesian community originated among the Aboriginal people in Taiwan, from which this language family extended through sea migrations over the past millennia, reaching as far away places as Easter Island, Hawaii, New Zealand, Philippines, Indonesia, and Madagascar where related languages are still spoken, making this migration the most extensive expansion of a linguistic group outside Western colonialism. The artist’s work is part of an effort to reconnect with her roots and contribute to a shaping of contemporary Taiwanese indigenous identity, after several waves of colonialism and cultural oppression, when one of the most significant aspects of Taiwanese history, being the original homeland of hundreds of millions of people spread across a third of the world’s surface, was ignored. She decided to travel to the furthest points of the Austronesian speaking world and paint her impressions, in a subversion of the position of the European explorer. Presented here are paintings she did in Easter Island and Hawaii.





Ines Doujak

(b. 1959 in Austria, lives and works between London, UK and Vienna, Austria)


Loomshuttles, Warpaths (2010-2018)

Mixed media

Courtesy of the artist


This project was produced in cooperation with Phileas – A Fund for Contemporary Art. The work started life as a collection of 48 Andean textiles, tools, and accessories, and developed as an eccentric archive. Its world, in which textile culture reached exceptional levels of sophistication and significance, was battered and distorted by the European invasions of the early 16th century. It survived, but the impact of those invasions remain as dirty footprints in the production and trade of the ’globalized’ world. The archive traces workers' fights against exploitation through time and geographies, and looks at how types of cloth, dyes, and colour are tied up with the history of colonialisms, revealing both their beauty and their ugly. To stay grounded, the modern figure of the Investigator travelled the Andean region, and in the belief that items of the collection can talk, posters have been created in response to them, inviting people, both close and far away from the Andes, to communicate with them.


Fires: The War Against the Poor (2012-2013)

Mixed media

Courtesy of the artist


This project was produced in cooperation with Phileas – A Fund for Contemporary Art. The silkscreen printed cloth is a fresco from the global war against the poor, who are often locked in with overloaded electricity circuits, living under threat of death and horrible injury by fire while fulfilling skin-tight clothing contracts. It directly refers to several incidents of the past years, in Pakistan and Bangladesh, which have brought little improvement to working conditions.



Jakrawal Nilthamrong

(b. 1977 in Lopburi, lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand)


Zero Gravity (2013)

Single channel video

Courtesy of the artist


The film journeys in the borderland between Thailand and Burma, and the borderland between fiction and truth, past and present. Set in Ratchaburi, not far from Bangkok, it follows a man on a journey into the history of that place. Ratchaburi Hospital was the site of a 2000 incident, when the hospital was occupied and staff taken hostage by the Karen Christian militia "God's Army" from neighboring Burma, lead by two 12-year old twins, Johnny and Luther Htoo.



Jamdani


Jamdani is one of the fifinest textiles of Bengal, produced in the region of Dhaka for centuries, and was originally known as Dhakai (a name still common for the fabric in India). The historic production of Jamdani was patronized by imperial warrants of the Mughal emperors, under which the Persian term Jamdani came to be in popular use, since it was the court language. Under British colonialism, the Bengali jamdani, and the similar, albeit fifiner, muslin industries rapidly declined due to colonial import policies favoring industrially manufactured textiles from Britain. In more recent years, the production of jamdani has witnessed a revival in Bangladesh, using traditional techniques and often natural dyes. However, muslin, one of the most coveted fabrics in Europe in the 19th century, widely depicted in the academic portraiture of the time, was decimated by British economic policy to the point of biological extinction of the cotton subspecies used for making muslin. Jamdani is the closest version that remains of the famed muslin. The traditional art of weaving jamdani has been declared by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.





Jimmy Ong

(b. 1964 in Singapore; lives and works in Singapore and Vermont, USA)


Seamstress Rafflffleses #7 – Mr. Florent (2016)

Cotton and Dacron stuffiffing

Courtesy of the artist and FOST Gallery


Test Batik #1, Printed Test Batik #2, Test Batik #3 and Printed Batik #4

Textile

Courtesy of the artist and FOST Gallery


Sketches for Fallen Tiger Batik motifs

Watercolour on paper

Courtesy of the artist and FOST Gallery


The work refers to the figure of Thomas Stamford Raffles, one of the most infamous British colonial figures in South East Asia, who nevertheless remain largely revered in Singapore. His crimes are well remembered in Indonesia, which has suffered from Raffles' invasion of Java in 1812. He is also the author of "The History of Java", containing the chapter "Ethics of Javan", from which the artist quotes: "A caterpillar has its poison in its head, a scorpion in its tail and a snake in its teeth, but it is unknown in what part of the body the poison of man is concealed: a bad man is therefore considered poisonous in his whole-frame.” The textiles shown here replicate the batik technique of cloth painting, a technique which has become associated with Java and has reflected in its development the many layers of colonialism and occupation of the island in the last centuries.





Jiun-Yang Li

(b. 1967 in Taitung, lives and works in Taichung, Taiwan)


Get the Sword (2006)

The Magical Performance (2009)

Forcing Me to Leave (2000)

The Immortal Kid (2014)

The Golden Immortals (2014)

The Stinky-Headed Kid (1996)


Black and White Impermanence - The Deities of the Two Paths (2005)

Ink on paper

Courtesy of the artist


Fairy-Fairy-Fairy 35 (2011)

Acrylic on canvas

Courtesy of the artist


The Immortal White Ape of the Snow Mountain (2016)

The Yin and Yang Swordsmith God (1995-2017)

The Knight of Black Flowers (1998-2017)

Wood, fabric

Courtesy of the artist


The Playground of Childhood Dreams (2008)

Wood

Courtesy of the artist


The selection of works is representative for the artist’s distinct practice, engaging with traditional Taiwanese art forms, diverse religious representations and vernacular culture on the island. The son of a movie posters painter, Li has himself worked on movie posters, temple painting, calligraphy, Taiwanese glove puppets, as well as multimedia installations. Hailing from Southern Taiwan, where a distinctive cultural environment, influenced by Taiwanese indigenous people and Hoklo (descendants of the first Chinese migrants on the island, speaking the Minnan variety of Chinese languages), is the basis for promoting a Taiwanese identity distinct from the Chinese Nationalist idea that sees Taiwan as part of the Chinese cultural world.





Joël Andrianomearisoa

(b. 1977 in Antananarivo, Madagascar, lives and works between Antananarivo, Madagascar and Paris, France)


Duration: continuous loop (2016)

Remember Iarivo (2016)

Yesterday. Repeat (2016)

Your eyes tell me stories of Paris (2016)

Where have you been? (2016)

Do you remember? (2016)

Repeat. (2016)

Last Year in Antananarivo, 2016


Inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper

Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid Last Year in Antananarivo takes as its point of departure a series of photographs of a ball held by the French colonials in 1900 in Antananarivo. In the images, Malagasy aristocrats are dressed in elaborate costumes reflecting the colonialists’ idea of a ‘civilised’ people. The work points to the ambivalent position of colonized elites in the process of imperialism, oscillating between complicity and resistance. The colonial ball was used by the imperialists to register their dominance over the bodies of the colonized elites, rendering the Empire as spectacle, another notable example being the infamous Delhi Durbar of 1911, staged while the Bengal Famine ravaged populations elsewhere in the country. 


When the day belongs to the night I, II and III (2016)

Textiles

Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid


The triptych is part of the artist’s practice of reinterpreting and recomposing fabrics into abstract and seductive compositions, which nevertheless bare the traces of their making and the stories of their makers and traders. The works presented here combine remains of cloth purchased in a market in the artist’s native Madagascar and of saris from Jodhpur in India's Rajasthan. The artist is interested in connections between people, places, and objects, in flows that often avoid the normative paths. While his native Madagascar has ancient connections to Asia, as the westernmost point of Austronesian expansion, Malagasy language being a close relative of languages spoken in Borneo, more recent connections between the island and India are evoked in this work. Gujarati traders, once a leading group of merchants throughout the ports of the Indian Ocean have settled in Madagascar since the 19th century and 70,000 descendants of African slaves and mercenaries, the Siddis, still live in India.