Cover and Concealment (for the dangerous, the deported, the dead)
Dye-sublimation print on polyester fabric
11 pieces in 3 sets
300 x 445 cm, 175 x 495 cm, 160 x 510 cm
Installation dimensions variable
2017
Installation view: Golden Mile Food Centre / Beach Road Army Market, Singapore, February 2017
Commissioned by the Asian Film Archive for State of Motion: Through Stranger Eyes
In a military context, cover and concealment refer to terrain and topography that are tactically employed to offer physical protection from an enemy or for hiding from detection. The 1971 documentary film In Search of the Unreturned Soldiers in Malaysia follows its director Shohei Imamura in finding soldiers of the Second World War who had chosen not to return to Japan. They were hidden and had in some way gone undercover in the post-war peninsula, but taking on new lives, transforming into new persons even, intentionally camouflaged from and abandoning former allegiances. With this as a departure point, the twinned tactical terms are extracted as generalised ideas to not only explore such personal agency in the formulation of dissent, desertion, and disappearance, but also extend into how governmentality and management are invested in the prevention of such escape, evasion, or emancipation. In an age being augmented by enclosing networks of predictive surveillance, could allegiances be broken anymore, or are identities to be increasingly fixed and essentialised along the lines of ethno-nationalist territoriality? What could voluntary disappearance look like for the ungovernable? What are the aesthetics and ethics of un-detection? Situated between histories of spatial reordering and regimented citizenry on Beach Road, the work is inserted into this environment as contemplation on the violence tethered to pledges of loyalty to power. It will serve as visual provocation for dislodgement from coercive ideological frames, and also perhaps as a means to uncover concealed imaginations towards autonomy.
Cover and Concealment is the first of two projects that will come to interface with each other across varying forms and degrees of legibility. On the facade of Golden Mile Food Centre that houses the Army Market, “cuts” of abstracted imagery and aphoristic text take the form of banners or flags. They read like possible statist proclamations; an odd, misplaced propaganda made with the same material processes used in outdoor advertising – though displayed unconventionally, laid out in a manner suggestive of uneven, folded coverage and “dropped frames” of information. Near-undecipherable photographic images hint at a hidden corpus of state-imaged (dangerous, deported, dead) bodies – they are actual cuts, slices, of backdrops and edges from: a conscript photographed as a recruit; a political detainee’s staged and televised confession; portraits of migrant workers arrested without trial for “terrorism”. The second project, placed at a different time and space than these banners, is a forthcoming visual essay that takes the form of a small-scale artist's book. It follows a continuity of thought surrounding escape, extending branching threads, weaving together disparate vignettes and narratives that contemplate opacity, speed, mass, labour, capture, data, foliage, displacement, and power. |