#kathleenditzig

[hemanchong]

Foreign Affairs is a series of banal #photographs of #embassy #backdoors. The systematic #repetition of #images #simultaneously recalls a #cinematic frame and the #omnipresence of the #surveillance #camera that watches #nothing and #everything. As a literal and cumulative #representation of embassy backdoors, each image of a backdoor can be read as #infrastructural, making apparent the very form of the non-descript embassy backdoor and its component parts: #greenery as #camouflage, the lone face of a strategically positioned surveillance camera, the additional lock or additional gates. These banal representations are the threshold of the exceptional space of the embassy, which in and of itself is the #physical #manifestation of an agreement between two states of respective #sovereignty. Foreign Affairs speak to the sites of infrastructural #power in society today. They implicitly point to society’s real fears of ‘back door’ #agreements, actors #invisibly and #insidiously pulling the strings behind the veil of the everyday. As representations of #information, the images of the two different series reflect both the front and back stage upon which fears of #international #conflict, #calamity and national disaster play out and/or are produced. Infrastructure has been described as the “overt point of contact and access, where the underlying rules of the world can be clasped in the space of Everyday life”. Infrastructures are, by design, made to be banal and invisible as part of their everyday operations. Chong’s oeuvre can be read as an imagining, interrogation and sometimes intervention into infrastructure as an everyday medium of politics. His works are ecological systems that take on a diversity of forms such as the book, the painting, the performance, the magazine advertisement, the party, the process of writing a novel, the social contract of an exhibition etc. Chong’s work in its adoption of conventions (such as the cinematic frame or the calendar) casts a shrewd lens upon on how the world and our fear of what lays behind the curtain of the everyday is produced. Text by Kathleen Ditzig #HemanChong #ForeignAffairs #KathleenDitzig (at Depot Heights) https://www.instagram.com/p/ClF3_c5rzAf/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hemanchong]

From #legal #parameters that limit how an #image can be seen to the #microaggressions of #protocols, Heman Chong’s conceptual practice is one that materializes the #invisible #rules of the world—the literal infrastructure that #governs and #frames our #lives. In his artworks, the every- day is a medium of power. #Monumenttothepeopleweveconvenientlyforgotten (I hate you) (2008), one of Chong’s most recognizable works, is an expansive installation of one million blacked-out standard-sized business cards, first installed at the #SingaporeBiennale in 2008. The installation implicitly points to disposable or lost connections. Since then, it has been presented in many group exhibitions throughout the world and has been collected by the M+ museum @mplusmuseum in #HongKong. Expanding into a sea of sublime shimmering black that takes over floors of an exhibition space, the installation of cards and “forgotten connections” literally remakes the architecture and defines the way individuals can move through the exhibition space. Chong’s recent work, #ForeignAffairs (2018– present) is a series of photographs of embassy backdoors, repeated in a grid pattern. Through their repetition, the images highlight the #infrastructure of the #embassybackdoor, such as the lone face of a strategically positioned #surveillance #camera or the camouflaged door. Thresholds that demarcate the exceptional space of the embassy, these backdoors literally delineate a physical manifestation of the conceptual understanding between two states of their respective sovereignty. Each image is a negotiation of the legal parameters of representing this liminal space and its powerful conceit. Chong has presented Foreign Affairs on a variety of surfaces, notably as #curtains, making them literal #thresholds that #impose themselves in exhibitionary spaces, obscuring as much as they reveal. Mobilizing the #banal, Chong’s works effectively #intervene in the #ecologies of their display, making evident the international #networks of #exchange and #systems of #governance that define the world in which we live. Text by #KathleenDitzig #HemanChong (at The Library of Unread Books) https://www.instagram.com/p/CewGh-XIFCJ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hemanchong]

The first time Pio Abad meets Kathleen Ditzig in person. #PioAbad #KathleenDitzig (at Tiong Bahru Singapore) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cd2kT_clCKw/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[hemanchong]

#HemanChong’s “#hedges” are #artisticstrategies that arise from his experience of operating out of #Singapore’s #authoritariancapitalism, as it fits within larger #globalsystems and histories of #capitalism. In a #transparent yet #totalizing #technocratic system of #governance, one has to be able to read between the lines that exist in the #publicsphere to perceive the underlying operations at play. An individual’s agency comes from navigating these systems and manipulating the material byproducts of the #system—literally working through and with the #surfaces of meta #governing systems. In #Calendars20202096,one is compelled to read into emptied-out spaces in order to “see” the system at work as it extrapolates into the #future, but it is this very compulsion to “read into” that is generative and enables a speculative system that allows Calendars (2020–2096) to “#predict” the future.” #KathleenDitzig #MoMA #BingHao #PostMoMA (at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art) https://www.instagram.com/p/CVN12yHpbvu/?utm_medium=tumblr

[hemanchong]

Heman Chong perhaps reads the Straits Times closer than anyone else. Abstracts From The Straits Times is a series of repetitive abstractions from Singapore’s primary daily newspaper. The artist’s abstracts are based on a cache of print-ready PDFs of the newspaper that he found online. Reading has always been a performance of a text and a remaking through instantiation. In Chong’s abstraction of a page from the Straits Times, an edition from the series about a broken down lift in a public housing estate, it becomes impossible to read the newspaper rather the repetition of the image illustrating the story ‘blacks’ out the text and cuts through it, insisting on the image as a self-evident statement. In a media landscape policed by the expanded understandings of political correctness, POFMAs (Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act), accusations of ‘fake news’, trials of public opinion and ‘deep-fake’ technology, Chong’s emphasis on the newspaper image critically points to the persuasiveness of the breakdown as envisioned in an elevator, a fireman and darkness at the expense of its context. Abstracts From The Straits Times are exceptional images in that they are impossible images. It is almost impossible to believe that Chong is able to create such an ‘alternative’ image of the newspaper because of the overt legal parameters that govern and define the newspaper business in Singapore. Beyond interrogating the modalities of news and the creation of public discourse based on marshalling compelling images, Abstracts From The Straits Times as conceptual object effects alarm in how it manifests the very literal limits of how we can read a newspaper. Text by @kat_ditzig #KathleenDitzig #StpiGallery #AbstractsFromTheStraitsTimes #HemanChong (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CNpLheqlx5e/?igshid=1iim3gym4vq4o

[hemanchong]

My new book #PeaceProsperityAndFriendshipWithAllNations edited by @kditzig and produced by @rollingrach and published by @stpi_gallery is on sale @singaporeartbookfair over this weekend! Please go and buy a copy! #HemanChong #StpiGallery #KathleenDitzig #Bookstagram #BooksOfInstagram (at 72-13) https://www.instagram.com/p/CMBzAsOloQB/?igshid=1hnenvmt8usbi

[hemanchong]

Go and see @carlosquijonjr and @kditzig’s show if you haven’t! It’s awesome! @bing___hao for @artforum : Off the beaten path, I was encouraged to find rigorous, research-based projects exploring the nuances and tensions of global solidarity movements. “In Our Best Interests: Afro-Southeast Asian Affinities during a Cold War,” an ambitious group exhibition cocurated by Kathleen Ditzig and @carlosquijonjr at Nanyang Technological University’s ADM Gallery, juxtaposed works by promising regional artists with archival materials, attesting to the curators’ skillful intertwining of scholarship and praxis. #VuthLyno’s three-channel video, 25, 2021, records a poignant conversation between three individuals of Afro-Cambodian descent twenty-five years after their fathers—all of them peacekeepers for the UNTAC (United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia)—abandoned them for their respective home countries. In a particularly discomfiting scene, a protagonist’s frank confession of mixed feelings toward UNTAC is met with uneasy silence, an allusion to the awkward irresolution of #ColdWar legacies. #KathleenDitzig #HemanChong #ArtForum (at NTU ADM Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CK2vNt8lHyU/?igshid=1ue9dwfxoqjdd

[hemanchong]

Thanks to everyone who came to my panel discussion today with @joshcomaroff and #KathleenDitzig! Last day to catch the show tomorrow! #HemanChong #stateofmotionsg #Singapore #ArchivingSg #lekkerarchitects (at Kampong Bugis, Singapore) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt8fkFgF1m-/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1kdzdu5lkyecj

[hemanchong]

Thanks to everyone who came to my panel discussion today with @joshcomaroff and #KathleenDitzig! Last day to catch the show tomorrow! #HemanChong #stateofmotionsg #Singapore #ArchivingSg #lekkerarchitects (at Kampong Bugis, Singapore) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt8fkFgF1m-/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1kdzdu5lkyecj

[hemanchong]

Last chance to see works from my new series #ForeignAffairs at this year's @asianfilmarchive #StateOfMotionSg curated by #KathleenDitzig. I'm begging you, please make time to see the show. It's really worth your time! I'm speaking tomorrow at 3 pm with #lekkerarchitects @joshcomaroff so come! #HemanChong (at Kampong Bugis) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bt5V584lLwU/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=11fzoie0azuni

[hemanchong]

It's the weekend! Please go and see my show curated by #KathleenDitzig #StateOfMotion at 11 Kampong Bugis now now now! #HemanChong #ForeignAffairs @asianfilmarchive (at Kampong Bugis) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtVBjMIlt79/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=hqa4yme9mx3l

[hemanchong]

Please head over to #stateofmotion2019 at 11 #KampongBugis to view works from 2 different series #AbstractsFromTheStraitsTimes and #ForeignAffairs! Thanks #KathleenDitzig for including my work in the show! @asianfilmarchive #HemanChong #Singapore #ArchivingSg (at Kampong Bugis) https://www.instagram.com/p/BtET8QYlVps/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=8dzon4f0xo2q

[hemanchong]

A review of my show in @friezeofficial by @bing___hao. “Throughout the exhibition, Chong appears to respond facetiously or provocatively to current affairs. But the topicality of his practice belies a broader investigation into structures of power. Indeed, as curator @kat_ditzig argues in her catalogue essay, Chong’s works ‘make transparent the everydayness of systems of governance’. This is perhaps most evident in ‘#ForeignAffairs’ (2018), a series of #photographs of #embassy #backdoors from around the world, printed onto #canvases and #curtains. The presence of these #clandestine #thresholds to #sovereign spaces suggests the need for both #access and #secrecy, #privacy and porosity. Chong calls attention to this #duality. Pulling aside the curtains, which cordon-off spaces in the gallery, visitors find themselves facing only more backdoors, this time on canvas, quickly dousing the thrill of revelation.” #peaceprosperityandfriendshipwithallnations #HemanChong #BingHao #KathleenDitzig #StpiGallery (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CP2hQ4_l2eH/?utm_medium=tumblr

[hemanchong]

STPI Gallery is pleased to announce #PeaceProsperityAndFriendshipWithAllNations, #HemanChong’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. From the #Brexit coin, the #backdoors of #embassies, the #spynovel, and #theStraitsTimes to the #QRcodes of #Singapore’s #COVID19 #SafeEntry system, the artworks in the exhibition bring together a #constellation of #conceptual gestures based upon everyday encounters and autobiographical objects that chronicle the complex #political and #cultural landscape of our present moment. In 2020, the United Kingdom government released the Brexit fifty-pence coin to commemorate the UK leaving the European Union on 31 January 2020. To Chong, Brexit not only marks a global turn to ultranationalism but also a real end to the British Empire as the nation turned away from the multilateral internationalism that the European Union represented. The title of the exhibition, which is both the text on the Brexit coin and an artwork in the exhibition, points to the commemorative coin as a byproduct of a significant historical turn in the #capitalist world system. A method of #decolonialising systems of power, this deadpan gesture of pointing to an #everyday object that is a vehicle and representation of global #power defines the #artworks in this #exhibition. This show is curated by @kditzig #HemanChong #StpiGallery #KathleenDitzig (at STPI - Creative Workshop & Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CLyWUHYFsBb/?igshid=1o2xz2muwwju8