sphinxindigo

[sphinxindigo]

a frangipani for her grave thoughts

<b>Ikkan Art Gallery  and <a href="http://www.helutrans.com/artmove/?page_id=14" target="_blank">Artspace @ Helutrans</a>

14 - 24 May 2016</b>

Works, performances, readings, daily actions, thick descriptions, seances, possessions with fundraising auction for soft/WALL/studs

Co-curated with <a href="http://kernlo.se" target="_blank">Kenneth Loe</a>

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ONE. Exhibition TWO. Auction THREE. Vigils FOUR. Sounds and Screenings FIVE.  Closing Requiem

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"Writing this o(r)bit of subobjects into being is akin to sucking on a post-coital cigarette; my body writhes at each inhalation, slurry-eyed as I "watch the curling rings, knots, arabesques, and drifts of personality go up and out". A means to two ends then: curled up in bed, spooning an anodized 13-inch frame. Conceived rather hastily towards the end of April 2016 after plans for another not-for-profit exhibition at Ikkan Art Gallery where I work at fell through, "a frangipani for her grave thoughts" was a deliberate exercise towards a loose curatorial (un)framing in light of a tight prep timeline aka 2 weeks a la fka twigs. Ent(h)rusted with a luxurious amount of space, both via happenstance and the generosity of Mr Ikkan, I gathered Xin, Luca and Stephanie and proposed that we do a group show together. The four of us had just signed a lease starting in March 2016 for the current premises of soft/WALL/studs, and were still very much in the process of moving in, etc. While primarily a site for our respective studio practices, we were (and still are) keen for the space to maintain a certain porosity and eagerness in housing a myriad of projects and activities, including a small physical library as an anchor to lofty aspirations. "At the end of expiration there is still a slight inflation in the lungs." - Dictionary, Version 2.2.1 (178) Lips to grave, stone cold Steve Austin, vita, mortis, careo. Teresa Teng, 金寶山, tout la nuit, Tehran, Iran; the Grim Reaper hangs on a line of a laundry as it scythes boulevards through fields of lalang before coming to rest under a pollarded frangipani tree, a placeholder for lone rangers. “And to kill time while awaiting death, I smoke slender cigarettes thumbing my nose to the gods." - Jules Laforge, La Cigarette"

Kenneth Loe, aromatherapist at s/W/s 26 Jan 2017

{image 22} {image 17} Kenneth Loe {image 21} Kenneth Loe {image 9} Exhibition Shot {image 16} Luca Lum (left, centre); Xin Chong (right)

<b>ONE. Exhibition</b>.

{image 12} <b>TWO. Auction </b> Opening performance, //FL_|_PS//, is an auction of collateral materials from an earlier Christie's preview of Modernist masters in the very same space. The materials from the Christies preview resurface on the very same walls used for the preview in <a href="http://www.helutrans.com/artmove/?page_id=14" target="_blank">Artspace @ Helutrans</a> and become subject to deflation and speculation as visitors to the exhibition partake in the affair on the very same day the auction is to take place in London. The title refers to the act of "flipping a work", which means to buy and re-sell the work of an upcoming artist quickly to inflate its value. The performance negotiates les petit morts of these inflationary and deflationary mechanisms in the art world with the explicit hijacking of its infrastructure.

{image 23}

<b>THREE. VIGILS </b> READING between the "line that usually winds into a circle" as Stephanie J Burt narrates fragments from a text she wrote & DICTATION 1.2 with Weixin Chong meanders around the headstones, silent and scribing.

With invigilation from Kenneth Loe and Luca Lum.

{image 10}{{image 15}{image 24} <b>FOUR. HAN2 elopes on a l➿ p de l➿ p to a whiff of 'Perfumed Nightmare' (Performance followed by screening) </b> 25 May

<a href="http://wujunhan.bandcamp.com/releases" target="_blank">HAN2</a> elopes on a loop de loop, chain lift, chemtrails, oscillating, repeat, marbles tripping over feet, trick hill ensnares, mime over matter, hiss to hither, service provider, loop that loop, dive drop, zero-g roll, pretzel knot

with Luca playing interference.

'Perfumed Nightmare' (1977) ~ a jeepney driver from the Philippine countryside dreams of the American promise and idolises Wernher Von Braun. (Finished with a post-screening interlude with Sidd and Cain)

An extra-diegetic stain left by Svetlana

{image 8}{image 19}{image 18}{image 14}{image 13}

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<b>FIVE. Closing Performance: May u live 2 see the dawn ☠ a trial design of a postage stamp yet to be accepted 24 May 2016</b>

A curatorial conceit between Constance Loewe and Foxkid Luca, Bcc: Rak Shakalaka

Performed w/ graffiti, HDMI cables, art objects, objects supporting art objects, CCTVs, plinths, Ikkan Art Gallery, Helutrans infrastructure, audience, the lady who was junk mail

Excerpt:

From: Kenneth Loe <kenneth@ikkan-art.com> Subject: V2V Date: 18 May 2016 12:28:38 am SGT To: Luca L <assistant@ikkan-art.com>

Dear Luca,

What does one do when coconut cream solidifies? Today I was awash with grave thoughts in the aftermath of last saturday night and it helped that you were around to sieve the waxy lyric(al)s out. What happens when one replaces tapioca with soap in a pudding?

He pursed his lips as he parsed string theories through lines of laundry, skeins of silk, cotton and wool entangling in the viscous tempest that threatens to blow the lid off his ashen teapot. Disappointment hung stale like a still elephant in the depths of effluvia at wit’s end; a perfumed nightmare elopes with a antelope to Guadeloupe. “Nice” complicity was not what undid the VVitch, it was felicity. Hannah decided to rub tiger balm on her joints so that she might better understand growing pains, these pressures fall soft as rain off her shoulders with a glisten of pleasure, light as a feather, stiff as a boarding school.

Can we speak of lateral inversions in place of literal hell? Your performance at the gallery vs you performing in the gallery vs the performability of the gallery - are you negotiating balance on a tightrope across the möbius strip, teasing snippets of glue from white walls? How do we then feel about this palpable anxiety of the meta register permeating the air of this material utopia? Do you smell fear, or rather, is pretension necessarily occluded within olfaction?

I await your one-line emails,

Kenneth Loe Asst. Gallery Manager

From: Svetlana <Svetlana@ˈiːθərnɛt.x*> Subject: Re: how much of vampiric is an aesthetic? Date: 23 May 2016 10:30:50 PM HST To: Kenneth Loe <kenneth@ikkan-art.com> Bcc: Luca L <assistant@ikkan-art.com> привет из ада! how much of vampiric is ANAESTHETIC ? Anaesthesia, ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from Greek anaisthētos ‘insensible’, related to anaisthēsia (see anaesthesia), + -ic.) How much vampirism numbs the skin, becomes something more akin, askin, asking, to excuse, to absent oneself, to be and not be, to be unseemly to unseem, to shine and then not… Is there a middle man draining your profit, get rid of them, it’s the information wage 1. Open your optical drive drawers 2. Obtain a disc of light 3. Scan the item(s) you wish to transmit to your chosen dead (me) onto the disc of light 4. Wait for all solids to dematerialise 5. As you would breathe in cigarette smoke, hold the dematerialised substances in your aching centre and think upon my face ... Do I believe in solidarity? [...] Are you asking if I apologise for mimicking the living, for miming their gestures, for saying I walk among them, for taking the mop out of the closet to see myself unpictured in the dim glaze of the CCTV? For seeking one-self-ness and affinity with what is otherwise a very distant moon? Or Brazil? I’ve never been and they say Hell is like Brazil, where it is a thick and hot night of life and death? ... Oh grave money! Oh windmills and water troughs!

~ +<< S VE T >> + ~

[sphinxindigo]

Still from documentation of Camouflet (2016)

Documentation of performance

In military science, “camouflet” refers to an underground explosion of a bomb or mine that does not break the surface but leaves an enclosed cavity of gas and smoke. In French it literally means “whiff of smoke in the face”.

Luca and her performance partner, Xin Chong, take their experiences as close friends, artists, and physical doppelgängers as the basis of their performance. They draw especially from a heightened state of being they slip into when they are out and about together – a playful guise which both caters to and vexes particular fantasies about their persons, and which evokes an insistent curiosity on the nature of their closeness.

Luca and Xin’s camouflet is an atmosphere of feints, actions that double for something else, and concealed implosions.They encase their bodies in similar garb, accentuating and also disguising their unique shapes, enact a series of coded signals and gestures towards each other, ranging from the tiny to the large, the gentle to the violent, the sensual and alive to the prone and inanimate; gestures made by fingers and feet, gestures that rend stockings, yank at each bodies, and which fold either of them into particular shapes. Moments of sensitivity, synchronicity, alignment, tension, evasion, and pliability emerge as the close pair expand the particularities of their relationship into the webbing of the exhibition space and its objects, their disembodied voices whispering the text Luca wrote for the show.

“Camouflet” was performed on 29 July 2016 at Yeo Workshop for “Klaus”, an exhibition produced in collaboration with LA-based Hayama Projects, on the conceit of “someone else’s map” – conditions of appearance, resemblance, metonymy, and speculation, as the artists involved move through a diffracted version of the Hansel and Gretel folktale.

Videography: Kin Chui

[sphinxindigo]

Brazil emerges floating like a casque across dead water -- a tourist plaque given to my parents missionary relatives as a wedding present. On Brazil's iridescent coast you can see cardinal directions. On a box of ear drops to clear congestion you can see crosshairs (or reticule) stamped on the ear. I won't talk about the photographs because they have always been a problem; they disavow any straightforward circulation or exhibition. Perhaps this is the deathliness and dispossession Barthes speaks of in the most mournful of images. I'm wondering if any of this goes beyond the symbolic or the hieroglyphic because I want to reach that place, is it impossible? Something like historical depth of information, something beyond myself but to which I am attuned to like a sensitive antenna. In this life and times that can feel like a violation towards others, images and objects that I've purloined. It goes back to my anxiety about autobiography. I am reading the Brazilian writer, Ukrainian émigré and bruja of Latin American literature, Clarice Lispector, and I can't move past page 23 of her last book, "The Hour of the Star". Her voice is a knotted, ragged vision. I am watered and born again in her language even or perhaps because, it comes to me translated. A little history: the book was recommended to me four years ago by a professor, whom after reading a paper I had written about personas and freeing myself from autobiography through fugitivity, asked if I had ever read "The Hour of the Star". I have been trying to read it ever since. Reading her means knocking against a voice so raw it rubs away its own skin, violently, vigorously, ecstatically, pathetically -- then it robs you of yours. It is a premonition of deathliness, a casting off of any fixed coordinate; Lispector, the anti-lodestone. Forever page 23. Return to page 23, rub raw and vaporous. ADDENDUM Moving around with my chosen appendage, trying to feel affinity, making visible an extra-diegetic action -- actions simply to mark myself as creator within that space on the days where I'm not working there as a gallery sitter. A confusion or reversals between backgrounded and foregrounded action. The way I twist my body as though aligning myself with a yoga manual could help me understand all the other subterranean drawstrings. Mostly afterwards I feel it is bad theatre -- a faux séance. But in its fakeness also a kind of sincere attempt at learning a language, of coiling my body to understand. I was responsible for the ladder and remote control and headphones set-up. We used the ladder to hang work, and the remotes belong to Kenneth's video work. The headphones I would later use to invigilate Stephanie and Xin's readings. Another support structure, another remnant, another extra-diegetic stain, a transitioning structure, incidental sculpture. ******* ***** *** *