Refrains On the Edge of Appearance
Exhibition
Sculpture
Exhibition
Sculpture
Refrains on The Edge of Appearance (or Refrains) is a group exhibition at outhouse gallery, featuring emerging and mid-career artists including Yadanar Aung, Lu Lei, Arty Nicharee, Aarti Pillai, Liszu Tan and Moses Tan. The exhibition presents a multidisciplinary dialogue of sculpture, performance, writing, moving image and textiles.
This project’s direction begins with Martinican poet and postcolonial theorist Édouard Glissant’s (1997) right to opacity, a strategy for resistance and solidarity amongst those who are routinely othered. Refrains examines this framework for relation through language—in its sound, text, narration, translation and censorship. Embracing illegibility over fluency, Refrains exhibits the experiences of artists from the Southeast Asian diaspora through fragments of clarity and noise. Each work carries a phantasmological
quality: sculpted, drawn, sewn or captured by hidden hands. Together, the artworks converse with one another across borders and tongues, embracing the multiplicities of national identity and lingua francas.
Entering the space, we are invited to attune ourselves to the reverberations of each work and recognise that there is more than what remains in the open. Rather than providing solutions, this project aims to create a temporary space for the construction of communal knowledge. The exhibition’s conversations expand through a series of intimate workshops, where visitors can rest and pause the impulse to grasp immediate
comprehension.
In a collective voice, we ask: In a contemporary (art) world obsessed with discovering the unseen, what is left? What forms of empowerment and political action might the hidden take? Outside of a colonial gaze that demands transparency, how do we listen to each other?
This project is supported by Shoes Off, a growing collective and network of creatives based between London, UK and Southeast Asia.
This project’s direction begins with Martinican poet and postcolonial theorist Édouard Glissant’s (1997) right to opacity, a strategy for resistance and solidarity amongst those who are routinely othered. Refrains examines this framework for relation through language—in its sound, text, narration, translation and censorship. Embracing illegibility over fluency, Refrains exhibits the experiences of artists from the Southeast Asian diaspora through fragments of clarity and noise. Each work carries a phantasmological
quality: sculpted, drawn, sewn or captured by hidden hands. Together, the artworks converse with one another across borders and tongues, embracing the multiplicities of national identity and lingua francas.
Entering the space, we are invited to attune ourselves to the reverberations of each work and recognise that there is more than what remains in the open. Rather than providing solutions, this project aims to create a temporary space for the construction of communal knowledge. The exhibition’s conversations expand through a series of intimate workshops, where visitors can rest and pause the impulse to grasp immediate
comprehension.
In a collective voice, we ask: In a contemporary (art) world obsessed with discovering the unseen, what is left? What forms of empowerment and political action might the hidden take? Outside of a colonial gaze that demands transparency, how do we listen to each other?
This project is supported by Shoes Off, a growing collective and network of creatives based between London, UK and Southeast Asia.
‘Obscured Fragrance’
Inspired by the royal heritage of Thai floral craftsmanship, this sculpture reimagines ‘Khruang Khwaen’, the traditional hanging floral decoration, as a solid stoneware form. The piece investigates the boundaries of communication and the politics of visibility, it explores how language is obscured or left untranslated due to the censorship surrounding the Thai elites. Through this solid form, the sculpture captures the stagnant reality of political censorship in Thailand, reflecting on how this silence continues to corrupt both society and the royal court itself.
Photo Credit: Dennis Ngan
