Other Things
(2022)Mixed Media Installation;
4-channel sound installation, pencil and cut-outs on silk paper, candle, dimensions variable.
What sits between expression and silence? Can doubt be given form?
Other Things is an installation of sound and paper cutouts. It combines personal reflections with soundscape, exploring the malleability of word, song, and meaning. The work reflects came from a desire to reflect on my own religious upbringing: of growing up and playing piano in churches in Indonesia (where I was born) and Singapore (where I grew up), for close to 20 years.
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In part, the work alludes to one origin story of my religious tradition: Martin Luther’s mythical act of pasting his printed “Ninety-five Theses” on the door of All Saint’s Church in Wittenberg, an act of theological challenge against the Roman Catholic Church. Canonically remembered as an act of bold revolution that sparked the Protestant Reformation, it was in truth done amidst great societal and personal turmoil: from the Black plague tearing across Europe, to Martin Luther’s own enduring fears of divine judgment.
So, on silk paper, a humble material typically used to clean and protect finished prints, I wrote personal reflections and thereafter cut the words out. This series of gesture, both additive and reductive, came from a desire to augment the seemingly-assertive act of printing and speaking, instead making manifest the gaps present in any kind of expression.
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For the sonic element, I wondered: what happens when simple melodic lines are compressed or stretched to extremes, taking up infinitesimal amounts or vast expanses of time? What happens in these intervals that the divine is supposed to occupy?
I chose to sing a memorable song from my childhood: the Indonesian hymn “Tuhanku Bila Hati Kawanku”, adapted from the English hymn “An Evening Prayer”. It used to be one of my favourite songs to accompany on the piano.
But this time, sung without accompaniment, the recording captures the raw inflections and imperfections in both my singing and pronunciation. With that recording as a building block, copies of it are then stretched or compressed in time – to be microseconds short or years long – and laid atop each other. This exercise in modulating time reveals variations where none was initially perceivable. Notes that were “on-pitch” wobble and every sung syllable dilates, resulting in an aural mix of hazy blurs and stutters.
But in time, and if one is willing, it is possible to identify pitch and pronunciation reconfiguring themselves. New (dis)harmonies will arise, ebbing and flowing, whether we pay attention to them or not.
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It is said that to put something in print, in black and white, is to commit; also, that words spoken are like arrows fired from a bow, which cannot be taken back. Both framings connote a certain eternity to the acts of printing and speaking, irreversible once done.
In response, the series looks to embed the doubt and anxieties present behind any act of proclamation or disclosure, however bold they may sound, in material and sonic form. The aim, then, is to dial the act of bringing words into the world into a gentler, more perishable form – as an expression of still speaking, but more vulnerably, tentatively, and carefully, with room for necessary doubt.
Exhibited at:
Material Memory, Spinnerei, Germany
The Faraway Nearby, Art Agenda S.E.A., Singapore
Reviews
Wong Kar Mun Nicole for Art and Market, "Review of Art and Market Small Rooms"
Jonathan Chan for Art and Market, “so imminent yet so beyond reach”
Miriam Devaprasana for Art and Market, “An Ode to Truth Which Binds Us All”
Amar Shahid for Art and Market, “An afternoon of reconciliation”
