Spectral Evidence - critic's pick on Artforum.com
Spectral Evidence
Doretta Lau
1A SPACE
Unit 14,Cattle Depot Artists Village,, 63 Ma Tau Kok Road, To Kwa Wan, Kowloon,
July 15–September 5
View of “Spectral Evidence,” 2010.
“Spectral Evidence,” the first of two exhibitions curated by Steven Lam at 1a Space, features works by Lin + Lam, Sreshta Rit Premnath, and Simon Leung. The pieces in the exhibition use the media, materials, and language of documentation to create narratives that provoke us to question how we perceive the world. Premnath’s Horizon (all works cited 2010) is a group of photographs depicting various monuments to Christopher Columbus, but the statues themselves have been removed from the images, leaving only the pedestals. Alongside these altered pictures is a faux granite tablet bearing a line from the explorer’s journal that highlights the oft-present gulf between belief and reality: WE WENT SOUTH WEST UNTIL WE LEARNED THAT WHAT WE HAD THOUGHT WAS LAND WAS ONLY THE SKY.
Lin + Lam approach the use of photography in a different manner in the installation Tomorrow I Leave, electing to use an almost banal aesthetic, evoking the sense of a kind of offhanded, personal approach to documentation. The images, some of which were sent as postcards from Malaysia to the gallery, are scattered and propped up on white pedestals as if they were casual vacation snapshots. They are also placed among items such as rocks, wood, and scraps of paper gathered from the sites of former Vietnamese refugee and transit camps.
Leung’s video Time Museum Time, 2010, was shot in 2008, during the lead-up to the opening of the Guangzhou Triennial, of which he was a participant. It captures workers toiling under questionable conditions and a limited time frame to transform a raw space into a museum, in time for the opening. The video makes evident that the problems of colonialism, class, and globalization haunt the realm of art. In all eight works in the exhibition, there is a sense that we are viewing streets, public squares, fields, and buildings that represent the most visible layer of a palimpsest, the most recently written chapter of a history.
- Doretta Lau
Spectral Evidence on ArtSlant
Spectral Narrative in Hong Kongby Robin Peckham
Spectral Evidence
1a Space
Unit 14, Cattle Depot Artist Village, 63 Ma Tau Kok Rd., To Kwa Wan, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China
July 15, 2010 – September 5, 2010
For its inaugural curatorial residency, 1a Space has invited Steven Lam, New York-based artist, curator, and educator affiliated with with both Cooper Union and the School of Visual Arts, to produce the first of two exhibitions: “Spectral Evidence,” which takes as its theoretical foundation the titular odd legal category first utilized in the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials and later picked up in theoretical texts on the Derridean concepts of haunting and the trace and Avery Gordon’s concept of ghostly presence. The idea certainly resonates in Hong Kong, where evidence of haunting due to violent death constitutes legal grounds for breaking property leases and where a major local artist, Adrian Wong, once turned a lengthy process of exorcism into an extensive project in the wake of a series of supernatural mishaps. Fortunately, Lam does not set out with such a literal interpretation of the context, instead working with two artists and an artist collective to construct narratives of forced migration, disappearing histories, and colonial power.
Simon Leung, based primarily in Los Angeles, contributes an archival photograph printed at life size, depicting a number of detained communist sympathizers in the 1967 conflicts in Hong Kong squatting in a stairwell. This “Proposal for Squatting Project/ Hong Kong” (2010) continues a longstanding series for the artist, evaluating the structural possibilities of the body as architecture by inserting these absent subjects from the past into the exhibition space. Behind this wall, a video by the artist entitled “Time Museum Time” (2010) loops for just under an hour, documenting his personal experience showing in the Guangzhou Triennial as hired manual laborers install the work to be exhibited in the Time Museum, a venue designed by Rem Koolhaas and located across several stories of a private residential complex. Projected, like the photograph of “Proposal,” at life size, the speed of the video is often artificially distorted, pitting the pure physical power of these squatting workers against the ahistorical and generic aesthetics of the museum and drawing attention to these architectures of the body, bent out of sheer exhaustion. In what must be the strongest work in the exhibition, another room is given over to Leung’s “POE” (2007), a single-channel video drawing from a range of materials including the life of Edgar Allen Poe and the forces of gentrification that threaten his historical legacy, the writing of Robert Smithson and his site/ non-site dialectic, the choreography of Yvonne Rainer, and the figure of the green screen as an interpretation of the Green Zone in Baghdad. The overall impression is that of the rather forced construction of a narrative of the contemporary moment through the evidence, so to speak, of ideas and figures existing only in a more immaterial state.
Sreshta Rit Premnath, based in New York, narrates the construction of otherness through complexity itself. In “Horizon” (2010), the artist collects photographs of monuments to Christopher Columbus from various anonymous sources, utilizing cloning tools to digitally manipulate the images such that the statues themselves disappear, leaving only the plinths, frames, and memorial texts beneath. The project speaks to a certain politics of remembering in its reminder of the fear of forgetting, but the choice of such an ambiguous historical figure also pushes the question of the criteria for such memorial practices. This sense of the deserving anti-monument prevents the images from functioning purely as examinations of the mechanisms of the monument: ornamentation, inscription, location, and so on. To one side, a seemingly nonsensical phrase, “we learned that what we thought was land was only the sky,” is given the treatment of monumental legacy, toying with the context and purpose of such memorial projects through ambiguity; the inscription is actually an excerpt from the journals of Christopher Columbus. In another piece, entitled “Ekphrasis” (2010), a series of images are reproduced on folded broadsheet in wooden frames, the nebulous content including a statue of Queen Victoria juxtaposed with an image of the monarch in the flesh, an abstraction of the HSBC logo, a marble slab, and a blurred pedestal. Taken together, these figures reflect or perhaps deflect the folds and detours of narrative either historical or remembered, gathering evidence from the World War II destruction of the monuments in Hong Kong’s Statue Square–where today only a single statue, that of a founding banker at HSBC, remains standing.
Lin + Lam, a collective project by Lama Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam, typically work through the collection of interviews, objects, and archives in an effort to interrogate national identity and historical memory. In “Even the Trees Would Leave” (2005), framed photographs and embossed text relate the conversion of former Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong. Able to be conjured for the spectator only through the spectacle of their disappearance, these sites of trauma and cultural quarantine, including the largest at Whitehead, have been converted to driving ranges and golf courses. “Tomorrow I Leave” (2010) includes a video component that superimposes letters between family members as an absent member revisits the former refugee camps in which she resided over tranquil images of the sea and islands. Here again the question of adaptive reuse emerges, as one side of a given camp area is preserved as a natural marine park while the other has become a parking lot for recreation facilities of some kind. In both of these cases an often unendurable history has been replaced with harmless sites of entertainment, aiding the work of forgetting in an ambiguous way and making it necessary to trace even this cartography of personal presence through spectral ambitions. “Tomorrow I Leave” also includes a number of assemblages of postcards and objects mailed from visits to former refugee camps in Malaysia, accumulating an aura of the talismanic that may be opposed to the purely documentary impulse of most historical investigation. The whimsical arrangement of these objects, however, takes away from the gravity of their haunting power on some level.
Key to this idea of the “creation of narratives-in-reverse” through affective recognition is the concept of research-based art practice, something present in spades in this exhibition but sorely lacking in most art practice across both Hong Kong and China. While attempts at “experimental art” at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and “total art” at the China Academy in Hangzhou have made steps toward such methods, these educational programs are restricted by a lack of willingness to transform the results of any rigorous research practice into a form of art other than the purely documentary. Partially because research-based practice is so well-suited to ideas of spectral narratives but also because of the developmental trajectories of international art within which Leung, Premnath, and Lin + Lam exhibit, this particular project pulls off a heartening investigation of alternative voices for subaltern subject positions in diasporic networks of residual violence. Apart from such political goals, the work presented here also gestures towards a future for socially engaged art after the dead-end of the relational aesthetics birthed by the politics of identity, transitioning towards a self-sufficient system of relationships between objects and a critique of the ideological rules and systems contained therein. Hong Kong deserves such curatorial experiments, and indeed still has much to learn.
- Robin Peckham
"The spectacle of power" in Bangalore Mirror
Nalini S Malaviya
Posted On Sunday, June 06, 2010 at 06:17:56 PM
The international art fair for modern and contemporary works, Art 41 Basel kicks off on June 16, and Galleryske from Bangalore will be making its debut there with Zero Knot, an installation and publication by artist Sreshta Premnath. The first Indian gallery to be accepted at Frieze Art Fair, London, Galleryske has established itself firmly amongst the top few art galleries in the country. Sunitha Kumar Emmart from Galleryske explains, “what we want is to nurture and develop art practices that are rigorous, and taking part in a fair like Art Basel creates a platform for us to further share the works of the artists we represent.”
"Moment as Monument" reviewed in The Hindu, New Delhi
Capturing The Present Moment Through Art
-Madhur Tankha
Aug 19, 2009
…The concept of “moment” implies sequentially, before and after. The criterion of isolating one moment from another is marked by intensity — of a political nature, for example, in Rit Premnath’s “Surrender,” a photograph of Somali pirates buzzed by a U.S. Navy helicopter. Cropped and re-framed as a triptych, the singularity of the scene assumes the quality of a cinematic event…
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"Blue Book, Moon Rock" in Art India
Premnath’s Blue Book, Moon Rock, featured a photograph of a shadowy moon rock, a chalkboard, a screen print of the moon and a light projector. Propped on a wall, each object reavealed a different aspect of man’s relationship with the moon. The dusty blackboard reminded us of science projects at primary school, while the fraying photograph recalled old magazine articles celebrating America’s triumph in getting the first man onto the moon. These rational readings give way to more mysterious ones as we approached the shifting light cast by the projector onto softly gleaming silver-sprayed acetate. Was Premnath recreating the bewitching effects of moonlight?
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Noah Marcel Sudarsky on "Blue Book, Moon Rock"
Artscape Magazine – Issue 01, June ’09
ALL THE ART THAT’S FIT
TO DRINK
by Noah Marcel Sudarsky
NEW YORK, APRIL 2009
“Finally, I’d like to suggest that while the symbolic and dialectical mounting stratgies identified by Rancière are still the two dominant con ceptual vectors in fine art, there is a third possible editing strategy, the elliptical. Sreshta Rit Premnath’s Blue Book, Moon Rock (2009) in stallation at Thomas Erben Gallery is a testament to that third path, which is perhaps the most distinctly contemporary, or even avant- garde, of the three. Referencing Wittgenstein, Premnath juxtaposes various materials and mediums representing an aspect of the lunar landings, which don’t collate in a symbolic vein to create meaning or clash in any heterogeneous dialectical sense. He thus combines a photograph of a moon rock, a chalk board, a screen print, and the light from a reeling projector on to silver sprayed acetate which evokes a kind of shimmering, unknow able cosmological constant. The rock is re- imagined by the versatile parade of overlapping media, suggest ing both the original, heroic impulse which brought us to defy our stratospheric limitations and reach into space, and the prosaic reality of the inevitably disappointing mineral manifestation which was returned to us. But really, Premnath isn’t making any point at all, merely hinting at the inherent, cosmic paradox that is life.”
Review in 'Canadian Art'
“Bangalore-born, New York–based artist Sreshta Premnath offers a different way of working with images in his series Freedom of the Seas. Four digital prints show cruise ships, often sinking ones, from multiple perspectives. Premnath’s choice to work with the cruise ships is a wise one—it evokes a site of mobile physical geography but static social geography, a context relevant to migrating workers and holidaying tourists worldwide.”
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Back, Forth and Round About
“Sreshta Rit Premnath’s (b. 1979, Bangalore) fastidiously intricate, yet low-fi installation Blue Book, Moon Rock incorporates variations of a photograph of a “Moon Rock” that shifts meaning through competing forces within his installation. A reproduction of a page from Wittgenstein’s Blue Book is displayed, with lined out text that frames the only remaining passage “We ought to talk further on about the meaning of ‘forgetting the meaning of a word’”. The quote threads the installation in which a meticulous, looping narrative of (and about) constructs of meaning unfolds.”
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To ‘Err’ Is Perfect: A Perfect Human at Dorsch Gallery
ARTLURKER.COM
Monday, February 16, 2009
By David Rohn
“In the middle of this room is a rather simple/elegantly constructed cut-out of a human figure entitled ‘Green Screen’ by Sreshta Premnath . The negative space is suspended by a frame while the actual figure is defined by the cutting; umbilically attached to the fabric it drapes across the floor. Perfection, as in e perfect proportion of the Ancient Greek and Renaissance concern is what comes to mind. The figure being as it is still attached to the fabric from which it is (mostly) cut, the negative(silhouette) and positive (figure) are presented as inseparable from each other, drawing again the exhibitions thematic comparison between perfect and imperfect; in this case suggesting that what is ‘perfect’is defined by dividing it from what is not.
Michelangelo’s comment that ‘David was in the block of marble’, that he only released it because he saw it there, comes to mind. The piece is called ‘Green Screen’ and it’s by Sresta Premnath.”
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"Current" reviewed in Deccan Herald
…”Sreshta Premnath’s ‘Infinite Threat, Infinite Regress’ passes on to the socio-political plane, though addressed to individuals. Manipulated, multiplied and enhanced images from a Bruce Lee film have the hero facing an invisible adversary in a chamber of mirrors. The effect is of high but confused, self-imposed or rather state-imposed alertness and fear, which becomes underscored by the TV monitor displaying an apparently clear, yet practically useless abstract graph, with the official estimate of terrorist threat in the US. ”
Black Box reviewed in Deccan Herald
Jan 28, 2008 – Marta Jakimowicz
Collapse of Certainty
Galleryske, continuing its focus on bold, young art, presents Bangalore-born Sreshta Premnath who lives in New York. His exhibition, the “Black Box” (January 7 to February 15) from evidence of air crash becomes a metaphor of the current collapse of clarity in a globalising world. Human and object movements spontaneously change and muddle perception, positions and values, while deliberate manipulation of the same comes from economical powers and advertising imagery aided by technology.
Usufruct Review
…Delicate by nature and pointed by truth. The show has its points of alluding its viewer in works by both Sreshta Premnath (Point Decapit___on) and Joshua Hart (_iso_) which each use objects like a cloth covered and running 16MM projector (Premnath) or a fake fur coat attached to distorted graphite drawings (Hart). Interesting to note their use of text titles, and how language has a strong bearing on the curatorial selections, given their literary roots in the formal and segmented nature of how text/context are interpreted through works such as this…
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Spectral Evidence Reviewed in NYT
…Sreshta Rit Premnath examines proposed plans to reconstitute the Bamiyan Buddhas destroyed, partly through misread history, in Afghanistan in 2001…
Spectral Evidence Reviewed on Artforum.com
…Sreshta Rit Premnath’s collection of images taped backward and canvases stacked against the wall mimics a Swiss group’s attempted reconstruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas that were bombed in Afghanistan, derailing their approximation of authenticity…
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Review in Flavorpill
Review of Bose Pacia show in Flavorpill
“Premnath’s work addresses the amputated leg of 17th-century anatomist Philip Verheyen. In a series of collages, the artist slices and dices Verheyen’s scientific drawings into delicate yet monstrous mutants.”
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Shifter Review
International Exchange for Poetic Invention
Sunday, January 21, 2007-Linh Dinh
“Shifter, edited by Sreshta/Rit Premnath, is virtually unknown among writers because it’s not, strictly speaking, a literary journal. Its statement begins: “Shifter’s nature is such that it changes every issue. What worked in the previous issue doesn’t work anymore. What failed may be substituted with new deficiencies.
“Certainly no failure, Shifter has gotten increasingly more complex and intriguing, with each issue a work of art that rewards close reading and looking, its various components deftly woven together to yield constant surprises.”
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This work by Sreshta Rit Premnath is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.
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Based on work at www.circumscript.net.net. Entries (RSS) and Comments(RSS).