Artist Statement (2022)
I would like to embody the traditional roles of a contemporary artist in a broader more flexible context. Because for me art is a process of cooperation, and it is not a one way street. The process cannot be solely decided by the artist themselves. This is an aspect of contemporary art that has drawn me to it. The openness and generosity I have experienced during my time as an art student abroad, being an active agent within the contemporary art and underground music scenes in Malaysia, has expanded my awareness towards new models of production, collaboration and kinship that cultivates emergent models of coexistence that embody aspects of democracy and equality which inspires me a lot. So for me the process of creating art is a reciprocal one. One that is not subjected to hierarchies nor scales of value because art can only be created by two or more parties working together.
Through that logic I feel that the time has come to put forward new models that are less polarised, more generous, ambiguous and therefore more productive. Through a process of kinship and collaboration that produces works that reveal the emergent and paradoxical that exists in reality. Because for me an artwork is the residue and debris that fall through the void of the artist's world of rituals. They are in fact transitory entities that reveal the effect of spacetime and the erasing of binary opposition to create complementary wholes made up of portals for the viewer to enter into a more expansive view of human and non human co existence by deconstructing the frictions of past and present. To dream up visions of a more inclusive, harmonious existence between all agents within the cosmos. Through the logic of this process, I aspire to invite an examination of phenomenological anthropology, ecological perspectives of the human relationship to nature, and phenomenology of the living body and the virtual body. In a non-invasive way. Engaging viewers into a dialogue on topics such as eco-alienation, sustainability, and the human relationship to the earth.
DEEP STATE: Curatorial text for Privacy Salon (2022)
Deep State is a concept explored through digital animation and graphic design conceived for Privacytopia by Copy Planet.The work is inspired by issues relating to data privacy, state control and human evolution. The work asks "Is data privacy a personal right?" "Could state policies determine constitutional mandates towards these policies that directly affect the evolution of societies?" and "How would these societies evolve?"
These questions central to the work, are relevant questions that come to mind with every registration notification and subscription that has become gatekeepers to experience, knowledge and information. Within this system we are forced to participate in the exchange of private data for access and inclusion. But is that as far as it goes? As we have become almost entirely dependent on telecommunication and digital technologies in our everyday lives.
The need to engage with and interact within the virtual sphere has become something inescapable. We live now within cultures of liking, sharing and posting online. Practices that have become an endorsed mode of interaction and existential need. Pointing toward an unhealthy narcissism. Which raises more questions relating to digital technology and its effect on human wellbeing. It begs us to ask. Do we still believe in the idea of privacy, and are we the ones conditioned to invite countless invasions into our private lives? Giving away pieces of ourselves so that larger and malevolent entities may profit from it without our knowledge. The notion of the sacred and of the private has become obsolete within this neo liberal capitalist ideology which permeates all levels of private, governmental and economic policy. All areas that we were conditioned to perceive as sacred have become a mere resource; a standing reserve to be exploited and optimized for capital gains.
In this all-inclusive world, all entities have become mere resources to be used and optimized and personal human data is not excluded. This means personal data becomes a resource for informational hegemony, surveillance and monetary profit.Therefore within this state of being there is a growing gap between existing laws and an information Big Bang that is eroding trust. Which leads us into speculations of invasive technologies and data mining of private data used for the exploitation, control and manipulation of the citizens of a state.It brings to mine visions of surveillance states proposed in literature and film.
Visions of dystopian societies proposed by George Orwell and
JG Ballard aims at a vision of a state where privacy has become obsolete and freedom and personal space has become mere ruins of a colorful and vibrant past. Within this context the works propose a dreamlike vision of a speculative future of a dystopian modernity, where bleak man-made landscapes dominate the environment and where technology has become an inescapable agent of oppression in order to contemplate issues relating to internet privacy, psychological effects of technology on humans, care and trust to understand the role that institutions play in the evolution of democratic and secular societies away from dystopian visions of grim, severe and autocratic societies where the personal becomes extinct.
2nd-Life (mixed signals): Curatorial text (2021)
Simulation, preservation, multiple identities, and alternative methods of being in the virtual realm has allowed an expansion of our existences. It has opened dimensions for existing in alternative multiplicities within a material reality of physical and monetary constraints. The multiple dimensions offered by the virtual seems to enable action, dialogue and discourse in a myriad of languages and aesthetics without the cost. Artists strategic uses of digital technology has opened up avenues for artists to explore their vision beyond the traditional and physical, allowing ideas to unfold in a distinct way, enabling artist to look beyond, the dogma of the physical, accommodating reincarnation of forms and the sporadic movement of ideas and concepts visualised by all who have access to a browser. Drawing attention to the unstable but ever-present forces that disrupt, escape, exceed and change the conception of a fixed incarnation towards a multiplicity of being.
Entering, Leaving or Staying?(2020)
Balinese masks provide homes for spiritual and transcendental energies to dwell in, and are therefore very important in Balinese culture. Many are used in sacred rituals, and even have ceremonies dedicated to their powers. These masks has many meanings first as a housing for spirits, second for performance, third for protection and fourth embellishment. Each mask seems to represents a galaxy devoted unto itself, its function giving it its identity and power within two realms of existence namely the material and spiritual.
The narratives of the identity of these mask often serve an important purposes of Balinese hinduism’s cosmology and as an artefact of a transcendental and unifying experience. Much like the smart devices seem to become an extension of us. More often then not in our everyday lives we find ourselves fluidly entering and leaving realms. A condition of living but never present, connected but never feeling, we traverse these realms everyday. Switching between between the physical/virtual, analog/digital, diy/ automation. Modern life seems to reflect an appetite for displacement and migration but what if the displacement was resisted halfway and we decide to stay in this realm of the in between..What experiences lie there ? What consciousness will grip us? In this in between space would we become the gravitational forces holding the universe together?
The Net (2020)
The enabling of the internet + art for the benefit of both worlds.
It is an attempt at contemplating the possibilities of harmonising virtual technologies on the web + Using the language of the internet + game experiences for art to open the portal to the humanising of technologies, making technology culturally aware, social and adapted to humanistic nuances and spiralling economical agendas
The sum = translating the power of the internet in the service of art
By accelarating the possibilities of embedding human narratives and cultural theory into the economics of virtuality and suspending it from linear logic and function as an open field unrooted in specific function.
What if? Multiverses & Metaverses A proposition for the exploration of alternate possibilities (2020)
-
A meta concept
-
fantasy encroaching reality...made real
-
The virtual as a tool to cultivate a new awareness about possibilities through a virtual, altering of the space time coordinates allowing the experience of alternate versions to be become a reality
-
To experience an alternative history in reality is impossible, we need to propose a change in the space time coordinates , disrupting the space time continuum. It therefore allows for the encroachment of alternate dimensions opening a portal into dimensions where events unfold differently.
-
The experience is contingent on the agency of actions made by humans and non humans as atoms generating the accidents that occur in the formation of a reality. Depending on the synthesis of these mutations a reality can and will unfold differently, opening a portals into a multiverse from a point of history.
-
What is sought is to change the space time coordinates and explore the probabilities (what if’s) through another temporal dimension.
-
It’s a virtual experience of exploration into non existent possibilities.
-
How would things unfold differently? is a key question to trigger a speculation on the compossible outcomes) it is the material that starts a sequence of events where by a new reality unfolds. A universe being formed.
-
However this can only be possible by shifting the space time coordinates to enter into relativity
-
Exploring probabilities, seeing life through another
-
compossible + imcomposible worlds
-
A proposition of possibility, an auxiliary glitch in virtuality.
These propositions is or pretends to be revelation = (A seed of revolution)
r=(A(s<R)
Enabling the exploration of a hidden frontier through simulation.
Embracing the complexities that create realities.Through discontinued time.
Through the string we can explore the unknown.
Action 2 (2020)
Action is
An unveiling.
The chemistry of emotion.
A serendipitous discovery..
A flexible activity.
It is dancing with the cosmos.
SEEING...CONSCIOUSNESS...BEING.
Perceiving...LINKING..
Aware and vulnerable....EXISTING.
THE UNIVERSE...inside out.
A way to fluidly engage.
A metabolic riposte.
In touch with the real.
in touch with the invisible.
The sum.
An inner world revealed.
Risk of Poetic Actions (2020)
The risk of creating poetic ACTIONS leads to mistakes that reveal with pristine clarity...how things really work.
Letting go of inhibitions and moving.
The VIBRATIONS bloomed...inner consciousness...
A bout of REVERIE
The RISK...is beauty.
Connection......Intimate vulnerability..bravery.
Awareness is....REVOLUTION..
An unfolding of meta matter.
Visions lucid and fluid.
Now we awoke!
A Week of Years (2019)
Un minuit in it.
Oui...
Lah carnivale, love, the humour...
Tech, grotesque, the apocalypse,
All included non refundable, A guaranteed revival.
Goya…Baktin..Warhol.
Pop.
Time, space, nature..
Online. Friends high, friends low.
Post human, transcendence...
Existence.
Ethics, aesthetics, the vicious migrant, the indolent native..Born to serve , born to count..a thief and a visitor in your own garden...Wow you speak good English, how are the winters in the eternal summer?
Where are you from?
Why have you come?
Meh!
I'm sorry...Wouldn't you rather know my name?
Time, nature, change. Indiscriminate.
A body of enlighten anarchy.
The rose.
I ching.
Siddhartha, Plato, Bakunin..
Polarity, possibility, imcompossibility.
Chicken chop, dead hare, batatas.
Aristotle. Leibniz. Bruno. Copernicus
We eat, we eat...we are united...
Cannibals.
Drinking from the tropical fountain...melange.
Machines in the south, the world wide web..The future. Beware the buck bill at the gates.
Blow jobs
Chess with Duchamps, tea with Bronte.
A stroll with Cadere...
Todi with Haron, champagne with Debord,
Futebol with Galeano.Boomerangs with Orozco
Ds.No reply..Finding that yellow schwalbe
Mussels with Broodthaers...Apples with Margritte
Gin.Singha.Delvoye
Wagner, Schoenberg.
Stravinsky. Shattered spring.
Trash, metal, punk.
Funk, rock, jazz,
Industrial, house, hip hop.
Puff...Ka-ching!
Spliffs. Flying
Onboard Jefferson air...white rabbit.
Impossible!
Landing at the bar two floors up.
Through the doors.
A pint with Hirst, printing in the social factory.
Circus.
Fantasy, reality, imagine the possibility.
Soul killers. Emancipation.
Maybe there is such a thing as freedom?
Nonsense!
Just for a second...I thought new meaning.
I almost had you believing.
Nonsense.
Once Upon a Time (constellation) (2017)
“Once A Upon a Time” examines ideas relating to reality, death and rebirth, social awareness, modernism, metaphysics and social memory. The installation encompasses ruins from a demolished public sculpture, everyday objects and art objects to explore the poetics of tragedy through the allegory of transformation, protest, ritual, and displacement.
By evoking autobiographical discourses generated by situating the various objects at intersections of each other. The work implies an ongoing dialogue that analyses the destruction of a cultural artefact as a starting point to examine the forces affecting the conditions we live under today.
The installation is ordered through the logic of the objects own memory and presupposed identity to create an axiom of their intersecting existences, to frame the work in a way that encourages the observer to experience the installation as a discourse of memory and evolution that raises questions about urbanisation, the value we put on art conservation and the development of avenues for art making.
Forward & Curatorial Text for Veronika Neurkirch's "Ripen At Home"
Foreword (2015)
Working with Veronika Neukirch you get a sense of depth, dimension and intensity that is often unseen through her cheerful demeanour and cool facade.
With her attention to detail through works that dwell on the mundane and sacred, we found a voice that speaks of formality but thrives on being non-conformist, a dualism that is both seductive and intriguing. It is a quality that translates into her works: predominantly satiric, minimalist and conceptual paintings, sculptures and digital collages materialised by using simple irreverent imagery, industrial materials and everyday objects that seem to be insignificant items or novelties.
Through her aesthetic sensibility, she transforms and reconfigures objects, that are generally taken for granted in our consumer driven over-entitled society, into artworks that inculcate a sense of sacred significance.Minut Init is proud and excited to host an artist who attempts to unearth a fresh perspective on our hybridised, absurd and fragmented culture.
As she elegantly confronts the subject of nature and the artificial, exoticism, art history, commodification and romanticism in the subtlest of ways, shedding light on the irreverent absurdities inherent in our postmodern, globalised, internet-driven economy.
Excerpts from main text (not in linear order)
In RIPEN AT HOME, Neukirch examines and celebrates the exotic while pointing out the fleetingness of this notion in the age of information and our increasingly digitised and globalised lives.
Despite being based in Malaysia for almost two years, the country’s culture and customs are still somewhat exotic to the artist. Yet, it has to be acknowledged that in Malaysia, the artist herself as well as her work could also be seen as exotic.These circumstances have led to the main theme of the exhibition: the re-evaluation of the term and the ever- changing meaning of exoticism, through an object-based approach.
The focus lies on the prejudice-free curiosity for other cultures - the selection of exotic fruit as the main theme as apposed to exotic societies, politics or religions is not coincidental. Navigation towards necessary political correctness is apparent as well as the assimilation of several interconnected art historic leitmotifs from Still Life to Pop Art, Readymades, Assemblage and Post-Internet Art.
The overall attitude of Neukirch’s process heavily leans on 1980s Remix culture, when the whole history of recorded music became available for resource extraction due to the availability of cheap samplers. She collides elements of foreign places with a different type of exoticism found in the past, thus hypothesising that ultimately, as we become increasingly aware of other cultures, only the past and the future will be exotic to us. With globalisation well on its way, in the artist’s lifetime the shift in perception of originally exotic items to the ordinary have been palpable.
As this is the artist’s first solo exhibition, its title expresses the acute awareness of the way young artists’ works – like not yet ripened fruit in the produce isle - are commonly seen as risky investments that demand the purchaser’s trust and patience. Tongue firmly in cheek, she points out that only the future will tell the true worth of any object. Certainty can only come with time as suggested by Walter Benjamin, ‘the critical potential of an object may only be unleashed at the very moment of its obsolescence’.
'Soul Killers Don't Quit'
What will be left in the future?(2019)
The title of this show is an ironic, if somewhat iconic statement. An epiphany, or realisation if you will, of how much has been lost to the sacrilegious repressive attitudes of existing power structures that are daily subverting our consciousness not to mention our history.
There is hope and the undertones are that we still the major shaping forces of the perceptions of human evolution and spirituality. These works are a cultural collaboration by Belgian artist Andy Wauman and Malaysian born James Ly borrow from extinct languages, once indigenous practices, abstruse spiritual totems, and rarefied religious symbols.
They are magical, ancient and primitive in nature and invite the audience to contemplate our relationship with the here, the now and the what will be. We have lost cultures and practices through the standardisation of languages, through the prejudice towards the other and the loss of indigenous cultures and their knowledge.
This is our so called 'bounty', what they would have us believe to be the gift left to us from colonisation, a jewel made up an inherited cultural dissonance. Progressive class & labour structures coupled with an ever increasing sedentary lifestyle have contributed to a spiritual void, the deepest darkest caverns of which are most evident within our urban populations.
We are living with a status quo where public perception and repressive ideologies of past and existing institutions have reduced and simplified civilisation to such an extent that has left us with a diluted misinformed version of our once fully integrated yet richly diversified existence. This exhibition is an opportunity to reawaken the repressed and fuel the fire for contemplating the moment and our shared future.
These are the starting points of discussion on various issues that relate to evolution, civilisation, politics, economics and perhaps most importantly, spirituality. They may well be the springboard you require to replenishing an over exhausted soul and reconnect with your primordial senses.
Revenge Lyrics(2019)
This work is part of my current duo show “Soul Killers Don’t Quit” with Andy Wauman. The piece is conceived as a metaphor for a primitive ceremonial experience intended to liberate the human subconscious and reveal man to himself through archetypal symbols that relate to linguistics and our ancient past in order to contemplate our future as civilisation through the evolution of pre historic and ancient civilisations.
It focuses on how language an essential human invention has influence destinies of empires and dictated how we view the world we live in.The scripts (ancient indus, norse runes, cuneiform and sanskrit) used are related historically and genealogically and were used for writing, divination and magic. The discourse of the work focuses on the lost of poetry in languages spoken today and how much we have lost culturally or creatively as a civilisation.
The composition made up of ancient scripts aligned into bars evoking the voices of the past in the form of rhythmic incantations is a starting point for the viewer to imagine how humanity has from in time immemoriam used symbols and words as powerful mediators of truth and wisdom. From the cave paintings to sooth sayers and poets , language has always been a way of expressing the cosmos through symbolism, metaphor and poetry to prophesies and inspire, predicting the coming harvest, who would win wars and to communicate with the gods about the fate of the those who seek to know, while spiritual incantations develop from knowledge about consciousness and how the mathematics of prose relates directly to the cosmic vibrations that align the soul and lead those seeking wisdom and truth on the paths to knowledge and enlightenment.
The work also addresses extinction and cultural appropriation in our post internet society. As much of the scripts used in the painting has disappeared from use through extinction, genocide, re-education, environmental discordance, tribal wars, colonialism and globalisation. Thus as we are living in a status quo where public perception and repressive ideologies of past and existing institutions have reduced and simplified civilisation to such an extent that has left us with a diluted misinformed version of our once fully integrated yet richly diversified existence. This work is an opportunity to suggest that that all belief and supposed truths are designed, changeable and ideologically produced.
Text for "Inured" paintings(2016)
Inspired by the transience of truth and non linear history this series of paintings represent self organised meshwork's in which materials are interconnected by their functional complementarities.
As major shifts in technology, human consciousness and education continue to change and influence our everyday perspectives of history, science, human evolution and nature. More and more often we realise that we are caught in a perpetual state of flux where by everything we know is subject to change.
Therefore within these works are a personal interpretation of the fluid cosmic processes that represents the alchemy of change that occurs constantly as part of our existence. Influenced by Bauman's liquid modernity, and the metaphysics of taoist and zen buddhism, these works can be read as ontological studies of change. Where by the structure and order are created entirely by serendipitous circumstances.
"With this approach I am able observe the different mediums as they socialise, harmonise and synthesise; Fusing into unified meta-geographic structures that are impressions of our relationship with the fluctuations of material life, revealing something primordial while at the same time breaking the ruse of a linear existence.
Metaphorical Mapping: A study of the language of identity(2011)
Androgynous symbols and fragmented images represent memory, the plane becomes a map representing the subconscious and its different perspectives and influences within the modern individual.
The question 'Is this the natural evolution of nature or a mere confusion caused by the bombardment of man made, repetitive and fragmented information received daily in our self built hyperrealist urban societies ? The body is neutral in conception allowing space for the time to wander. While still allowing independence to carry with it a theme to enter into nostalgia, man and the environment, nature, religion, war and feminism and how these influences impact our perceptions of nature of identity.
Denudare(2016)
The work fuses both sculpture and performance, art history and rock and roll to deliver a message of despair and revolution. The structure is made out of recycled canvas frames from my earlier paintings serving as a marker for destruction and revolution. On a larger scope it also reflects on the marginalisation of blue and middle class labour within the contemporary urban topography.
The work implies notions of civil apocalypse, unequal distribution of wealth, manual labour, economic depression and rising nationalism as a precursor to rebellion and revolt. The performance component of the work directly references Lady Liberty but as an metamorphic icon of liberty, equality and empowerment which is why the piece requires audience participation where by a lady of any nationality or age is invited to strum a guitar for 5 mins every hour for the installation to be complete.
Fragments of Absurdity (2011)
The works are lucid contemplations of reality, language, androgyny , history of communication and divination composed within a body of fragmented images.
As the plane becomes a map representing different perspectives and influences from within the humanoid. By observing this map, one is forced to excavate and make sense of a stream of consciousness, that is unfolding the spiritual and political developments of our accelerated culture, revealing to us something about our neurotic and absurd expansion as a species and to speculate on the various possibilities for the future.