On Attachments and Unknowns: On Sharing Unstable Space
ERIN GLEESON
February 20, 2019
Visiting as part of the Pacific Crossings series, curator Erin Gleeson will speak about affinitive artistic and curatorial strategies at work in the exhibition On Attachments and Unknowns. This group exhibition was held within the second research residency FIELDS (2017), hosted by SA SA BASSAC, a non-profit contemporary art space in Phnom Penh, Cambodia (2011-2018). Thirteen artists’ works were convened in part to consider practices of imaging personalized countervisions to statecraft ideologies and methods in their respective contexts. On Attachments and Unknowns looked to the space of the ‘How’ to let an exhibition be an unstable space that follows artist’s intentions to resist immediacy of message. With each artist and work located in Southeast Asia, and all but one artist identifying as female, a reflection on the exhibition proposes a series of questions: What can a regionalist and gendered framing of an exhibition offer? How can one curatorially rhyme with the methods by which artists conceive of power within their primarily authoritarian environments? How can an exhibition resist the habit to communicate artist’s resolve, action or agency within political and social movements?