Nadim Abbas
I Would Prefer Not To (宅男), 2009
I Would Prefer Not To is a series of photographs that displays objects and imagery culled from manga, anime and otaku subcultures. Subcultures which have become associated in Asia with a certain personality which Abbas describes as a “man without qualities”. This name refers to Robert Musil’s three-volume work, ‘The Man Without Qualities’. Such personas can also be found in the literary works of Herman Melville. The title, I Would Prefer Not To comes Melville’s character Bartleby, from ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ (1853) who utters the words every time he is told to do something. The colloquial Chinese term for this personality refers to a person (usually male) lacking in social skills, who walls himself up in his room, cut off from the “real” world, immersed in the internet, videogames, anime, or comic books.
Juliette Bonneviot
Minimal Jeune Fille E-Waste Strategy Board, 2013
The E-Waste Strategy Board stems from a fictionalized housewife called ‘Minimal Jeune Fille’ who is obsessed with trying to apply industrial “green” strategies in her household. The work is inspired by online communities of housewives who attempt to apply industrial Zero Waste strategies at home. The parallel between the industrial world and the everyday environment of the Zero Waste Housewife is embodied in the manifestation of her recyclable waste: here a PET plastic sheet. The work is composed of an aluminum-dibond sheet industrially engraved with an E-Waste recycling flow scheme. The aluminum sheet is then covered by a PET semi-rigid plastic sheet, manually engraved with a soldering iron. Drawn on the PET plastic sheet is a world-map of legal and illegal Ewaste exports to African and Asian countries. It also presents the viewer with some hand-written tips in order to reduce electronic consumption and waste, along with some comments taken from online Housewife forums. The PET plastic sheet has been melted with a heat gun, which deforms the plastic and increases the neurotic, obsessional look of the piece.
Heman Chong
Eleven Official Tourism Promotion Slogans From Eleven Countries in South-East Asia, 2012
Chong lists a number of Southeastern Asian tourism slogans in an undifferentiated fashion, highlighting their idealistic tendencies and their use of clichés. Words such as ‘charm’, ‘kingdom’, and ‘miracle’ conjure up stereotypical imagery of the exotic other, catered to the western tourist. The removal of colour from the usually serene background image further distances these slogans from their original context, unsettling the viewer’s usual points of reference.
Heman Chong
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE (SINGAPORE PAVILION / 55TH VENICE BIENNALE / 2013), 2013
Closed Until Further Notice is an offset print poster announcing what appears to be an exhibition, with the central graphic being an enlarged broken image link symbol. Upon closer inspection, one can deduce that the symbol refers to the discontinued Singapore Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale. The poster was made in reaction to the Singapore government’s decision to opt out of mounting a national pavilion at the biennale. Despite the wide critical acclaim toward Singapore’s presentations in previous years at Venice, an exhibition regarded as one of the most prestigious platforms for international contemporary art, the Singapore government decided to cancel its 2013 participation. This decision came as a blow to the local arts community. With Closed Until Further Notice, Heman Chong explores the plausible gaps and broken links this decision produced: the literal gap of Singapore’s suspended participation at the 55th Venice Biennale, and the figurative gap in understanding between policymakers and artists. Alongside paraphernalia such as Chong’s open letter to Dr. Yaacob Ibrahim (Minister of Singapore’s Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts) on the subject of Singapore’s omission, the A0-size Closed Until Further Notice poster takes a deliberately conventional form, cheaply reproducible and ready for mass dissemination as a way to physically fill the void created by this self-induced omission. Wishing to see Closed Until Further Notice to its logical conclusion, Chong also purchased ad space to run the poster in the contemporary art magazine ArtAsiaPacific. Embodying a political gesture of resistance and a disseminated critique masked as the promotional, Closed Until Further Notice functions symbolically as an ad for an event that will never happen.
Pauline J. Yao and Amanda Lee Koe
Clegg and Guttmann
The Age of Syncopation (Album Cover Front), 2008
The Age of Syncopation (Album Cover Back), 2008
These photographic prints form over-sized, fictional record sleeves which Clegg and Guttmann imagined as being produced on the occasion of the 2008 exhibition held here at Wilkinson gallery, titled ‘The Age of Syncopation’. The exhibition was based around five installations which demanded visitor’s to participate in making music and sounds. ‘The Age of Syncopation’ refers to the introduction of the syncopated beat within the structure of the standard beat which traditionally holds a western classical music score together. Clegg and Guttmann highlight the influence of the syncopated beat upon western culture with slavery, and the 18th Century forced migration of African people from their homelands. They brought more complex rhythms with an emphasis which strays from a standard beat. Clegg & Guttmann’s exhibition was a rejection of the predetermination of the traditional gallery experience through participation, echoing the freeform aural narrative created by rhythm and blues music. When invited to exhibit, the duo regularly look to the social history of the venue inhabits. In this case they became interested in the east London’s relationship with teddy boys. In the 1950s, Bethnal Green, the area of London area in which Wilkinson lies, became the smartly dressed outsiders antidote to Saville Row with a growing number of tailors catering for the teddy boy outfits. Clegg and Guttmann’s practice combines their understandings and experiences in order to create new narratives. In this instance they have traced the blues influenced rock n’ roll soundtrack of the teddy boys back to its natural Afro American (via Edwardian ragtime) routes.
Harm van den Dorpel
On Usability, 2011
On Usability is part of a series that Harm has been working on since 2011. The series consists of ‘tablet scale’ assemblages or collages. ‘Tablet-scale’ can refer to an iPad, a stone tablet or any other man-made device that is either a document or contains a document. This distinction resonates, highlighting the question, whether human beings are our bodies or whether we have bodies. The term, Usability, comes from user interface design and describes how the user should interact with a given interface – the character of the device, rather than the simply, it’s ‘look’. The use of the ID image refers both to the Id of the Freudian threefold, Id, ego and super-ego; as well as being an abbreviation of the Adobe program for document creation, InDesign. The image of the shopping receipt mentions some of the materials purchased to make the piece. The technical background image is a fractal, that Harm developed himself, using mathematical equations.
Harm van den Dorpel
Strategies, 2011
Strategies is pseudo-generative film which documents the process of making two collages. A video collage, within which Dorpel combines Tumblr images and other found footage that he collected over the course of two months. Dorpel has then combined these images with rewritten phrases of advice given by business experts, martial arts gurus, software developers and Jacques Derrida, set to a background track made in 2002 by Dorpel.
Fang Lu
Lovers Are Artists (Part 1), 2012
Lovers Are Artists (Part 1), composed of four channel videos, records the everyday activities of a young woman. The works are essentially slide shows, thousands of images edited together. The work is split into four parts, a narrative thread flowing through them. The images begin following the woman undertaking relatively normal, mundane activities, like buying vegetables and eating yoghurt. As the day progresses her tasks and activities become more nonsensical, even fictional as a type of narrative unfolds, but a narrative with no purpose or particular direction. The day progresses but her tasks remain meaningless and do not serve any functional purpose, jolting our traditional understanding of what constitutes narrative. The use of a series of stills rather than a continuing moving image explicitly announces the artistic process and makes the viewer aware of the means of image-making. We are made aware of the camera’s presense and its role as both an objective witness and a tool which manipulates emotion to elicit new forms of experience. Lovers Are Artists (Part 1) takes its cue from Roland Barthe’s ‘A Lover’s Discourse’ (1977) which attempts to rationalize the irrational emotion of love and its all-consuming state of being. In his fragmented text Barthes likens of the state of being in love to that of an artist, and relies on a rhetorical device known as the “image repertoire”—a storehouse or theatrical stock of images onto which the amorous subject inscribes him or herself. The amorous subject of Fang Lu’s installation—a young woman whose lovesick state sets her somewhat off-kilter—is herself the subject of an accumulation of images that signifies simultaneous engulfment and annihilation.
Ilja Karilampi
.BIZ, 2012
Karilampi’s practice intermingles found footage, accumulated material and visual effects in an unconventional form of graphic design, in order to create his own narrative. .BIZ is composed of a flyer Karilampi ghost-designed for a ‘beastonleash’ party held at the W139 Space for Contemporary Art in Amsterdam in 2011. Beastonleash.biz is a DJ crew founded in 2010 by Karilampi, along with artists Yngve Holen and Cracksmurf aka Lars Holdhus. The work consists of the front and back of the flyer, both framed above a black light neon, emphasizing the trippy club aesthetic. The work is made to resemble cheap, large RnB party style posters that are common in the US. Karilampi often produces club flyers and posters for events and so wanted to take something that was not intended as an artwork and place it in a gallery context in order to reimagine its function. Karilampi intends for the activities, aesthetics, and narratives of his everyday world to infiltrate his work. Karilampi recently published ‘The Hunter in the Armchair’ with Morava Publishing House in 2012.