Breach
Dye-sublimation print on chiffon
120 x 110 cm
2017
Installation view: soft/WALL/studs, Singapore, July 2017
“The entire social life of the metropolises works like a gigantic demoralization enterprise. Everyone within it, in every aspect of their existence, is held captive by the general organization of the commodity system. One can very well be activist in one organization or another, go out with one’s group of ‘buddies,’ but ultimately it’s everybody for themselves, each in his own skin, and there’s no reason to think it might be different. Every movement, however, every genuine encounter, every episode of revolt, every strike, every occupation, is a breach opened up in the false self evidence of that life, attesting that a shared life is possible, desirable, potentially rich and joyful. It sometimes seems that everything is conspiring to prevent us from believing this, to obliterate every trace of other forms of life — of those that died out and those about to be eradicated. The desperate ones at the helm of the ship are most afraid of having passengers less nihilistic than they are. And indeed, the entire organization of this world, that is, of our strict dependence on it, is a daily denial of every other possible form of life.”
To Our Friends, The Invisible Committee |
Breach was produced for the inaugural Horizon99, a collaboratively designed serial cross-media project that attempts to think through the party beyond neoliberal castings of leisure and escape, or the taking of the political as just form and aesthetic performance. It proposes a melding of multifarious senses and spaces as potential and platform, with the party as both dance party and political party, as (comm)union, as a publication or broadcast originating from, situated in, but also counter to precarity, fear, and inertia.
The print, acting like a curtain, hangs at the entranceway to the dance floor – a space repurposed from a collective artists' studio – as a literal breach between worlds. Soft and billowing in a humid non-airconditioned space, it features quotes from The Invisible Committee and Mark Fisher, each only readable from either "inside" or "outside", placed alongside abstract forms re-appropriated from legal boundaries imposed upon policed populations, now graphically crystallised, reflective, and perhaps even fragile. A display of six written contributions ruminating on futurity edited by the library-infoshop wares hang from the walls of this tunnel, ready to be read or taken home, a direct confrontation to assumed behaviour at a rave space. |
Text excerpt from collaborative poster publication series |