artist statement
'29 '1 '58 '48 '17
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In my practice, I work with time-based, sculptural, and multimedia installations, performance, software, curation, and text as an inquiry into biotechnological processes, futurity, speculative mythscience, and intersubjective relations. Interweaving worldbuilding, language, organic-synthetic processes, and fictioning in dialogue with diasporic lifeworld and the technoscientific imaginary, my research and practice question and examine the artefacts of spatiotemporal interspaces, non-places, and the entanglement of human and more-than-human agencies in continual processes of becoming. Tracing the registers of harm and synergy on the body, and its Sisyphean cycles that entwine the nonhuman, symbolic, and sacrificial, my work renders how the in-between in peripatetic contexts and the exigent, political nature of risk could be potentialised to destabilise and transform intricate structures of the socio-cultural macrocosms we exist in.
Catalysed by a nomadic transnational upbringing and conundrums reflective of collective issues around precarity, displacement, violence, and agency, various spaces are indexed and interpolated in my work — abject and surreal, transitory/perpetual, (im)material interspaces. In my recent research projects, the referenced occurrences have transformed in a quasi-alchemical process from the immaterial to material, from events to material evidence and vestiges, and from the real to the parafictionalised. Through enactments of thought experiments and varied forms of reasonings applied onto the real life propositions, the research and work recurrently lead to or become visceral speculative Catch-22 scenarios and solutions. Seemingly unlikely and complicit with the structures of power that the processes attempt to revolt against, but oftentimes the only viable ones left, these outcomes implicitly echo their Kafkaesque premises and refract the lifeworld within the current strange, uncertain era, ruptured by signs of the coming cultural shifts.
My working process is research-based, generative progression that takes from rhythms of spatial encounters, cultural theories, and observations into forms that bleed out from their previous frames of afterimages. I work across the mediums and often take considerations at the arrival of any discernible form on the material plane, spanning and yet intercepting the mediated agencies of time-based, sculptural, and multimedia installations, performance, software, curation, and text. After periods of extensive research oftentimes of an interdisciplinary nature, an exoskeleton of thought experiment(s) begins to take hold, built upon an internal framework of presuppositions, speculations, limit situations and non-sequiturs, leaving behind material and forensic vestiges of such framework to transpire and collide with one another in a constellational worlding/webbing of possibilities and narrativity. At the manifestation stage, sometimes collaborations across disciplines (with cryogenic scientists, biochemists, and computational architects, as in the latest research project for instance) take place to further the interdisciplinary inquiry and actualisation of the thought experiment. At any given stage, a 'logically' sound framework is upheld as a principle (and to be potentially subverted), and yet by which frame of reference is contingent on the specificity of its subject matters.