Solo exhibition
Rotterdam, The Netherland
In Spirits in the Material World, artist Heman Chong reflects on spaces that exist in the grey, the darkness, the slippages into the netherworld.
Places haunted by aswangs, hantus, jinn, yokai, and other unnamed spirits.
Chong collapses three diverse situations into one single physical grid within Het Nieuwe Instituut. The first is a fully functioning bookshop with around a hundred titles that oscillate between books that claim to offer sound, logical advice for investing in real estate, to books filled with ghost stories. This bookshop explores the cold, hard home of late capitalism where everything, including the intangible, can be commodified and mobilised for profit.
The second involves a chance encounter with Mr Teo, a mysterious real estate agent in Singapore claiming to be a ghost whisperer. The artist hired Mr Teo to communicate with a spirit who refuses to leave an empty plot where the Rochor Centre, an iconic brutalist public housing estate, once stood. Transcriptions of this conversation accompany a structural video of the Rochor Centre; demolished and forgotten, the remains are filmed through the small holes in a temporary fence around the lot.
The third strand of the exhibition is a public programme including the screening of horror films selected by the artist. The programme consists of a screening of Dark Water on 10 October, The Others on 31 October and A Ghost Story on 5 December.
Spirits in the Material World is curated by Marina Otero Verzier (Director of Research, Het Nieuwe Instituut). The title of the exhibition is derived from a 1981 song by The Police on their album Ghost in the Machine.
