Exhibition: UnAuthorised Medium

Erica Tan, Forgotten Weaver at Framer Framed (2018). Foto: Marlise Steeman

16 Sep –
18 Nov 2018

Exhibition: UnAuthorised Medium

Curator: Annie Jael Kwan
Artists: Korakrit Arunanondchai, Noel Ed De Leon, Ho Rui An, Vong Phaophanit & Claire Oboussier, Amy Lee Sanford, Sim Chi Yin, Erika Tan, Sung Tieu, Tuan Mami, Vandy Rattana, Boedi Widjaja, Sau Bin Yap

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.

UnAuthorised Medium, foto (c) Eva Broekema

Opening weekend

The exhibition opens with a public programme of performances, presentations and conversations with artists Erika Tan, Noel Ed De Leon, Sung Tieu and Sau Bin Yap, alongside guest contributors who will expand on the themes explored in the exhibition in relation to the contexts of artistic practices.

Programme
Saturday 15 September, 17:00
Official opening, including the opening performance I Existed I Mattered I Was Alive (2018) by artist Noel Ed De Leon and introductions by curator Annie Jael Kwan and Framer Framed director Josien Pieterse.

Sunday 16 September, 12:00 – 16.45
Symposium Return and Repatriation. With contributions by Panggah Ardiyansyah, Erika Tan, Ong Jo-Lene, Wim Manuhutu, Sau Bin Yap, Sung Tieu, Eva Bentcheva, Noel Ed De Leon and curator Annie Jael Kwan.

Made possible with support by
Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture & Science, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts, Tolhuistuin, Prince Claus Fund, National Arts Council Singapore, YAA (Young Art Support Amsterdam), Outset Netherlands, Mercedes Zobel, Nell Sully, Sandra and Marlof Maks.