Group Exhibition Framer Framed, Amsterdam,Netherlands
When collective memory has been fractured by decades of ruptures, there are ‘ghosts’ in the archive.
UnAuthorised Medium brings together artworks by internationally established and emerging artists, who have deep connections to Southeast Asia while also working extensively across the globe. The artists resist prescribing the frame of ‘Southeast Asia’ as homogenous, activating local histories, communities and knowledge that have been erasured and ruptured as a result of international and civil conflict, genocides, colonisation, ecological disasters, globalised development and international capitalism.
The exhibition appropriates its title from áp vong, a Vietnamese ritual of invoking the ‘dead’. Visitors improvise a ceremony where the ‘dead’ are called up to resolve questions of inheritance and to locate lost, loved ones. The exhibition references this liminal evoking of those lost, suspended or forgotten. Where there are holes in our memories, we search for signs and reconstruct stories.
The featured artists evoke the ‘ghosts’ – ‘glitches’ in the archive, interrogating our systems of knowledge by reclaiming the states of absences and slippages within categorical and extractive archival systems. They stir up these vivid apparitions and shadows through a range of artistic approaches. In doing so, they recuperate more nuanced accounts of subjective agency, and make apparent the form and act of construction.
Just as the áp vong does not utilise a professional medium, but having entered the ‘ghost room’, possession is channelled randomly via someone whose desire activates the process, the exhibition borrows this sense of wilful transformation. UnAuthorised Medium poses an invitation for visitors of the exhibition to become ‘mediums’ too – with the agency of interpretative mobility across.
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