Travelling exhibition at NTU ADM Gallery and MAIIAM
By Roger Nelson

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, '2022.4', 2022, embroidery on digital C-print on canvas, 125 x 205cm, installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and NTU ADM Gallery.

The main body of my pet octopus consists of the first temporal aspect, category or idea…: the contemporary.

(Guided by and departing from the ideas of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Mieke Bal,) this exhibition reckons with artmaking as a practice of thinking. How does art think about other art? And about narrative? And about time?

Artworks tell stories, sometimes, and sometimes these stories are taken from elsewhere: from other artworks, from literary sources, from the media or from movies. Narratives are transformed by sliding between makers and gliding between different historical moments and political contexts. What kind of image-thinking happens during these processes?

Ian Tee, '《爹爹，我把骨肉还给您》', 2023, destroyed aluminium composite panels, 8 panels, each 150 x 120cm; acrylic on wall. Image courtesy of the artist and NTU ADM Gallery.

Perhaps we can think of artworks as unfaithful responses to and adaptations of literary and artistic precedents. Perhaps the experience of time in artworks is not linear or cyclical, but instead like an octopus whose tentacles reach into every dimension. These tentacles encircle stories, transforming them into thought-images and devouring them.

The artworks in this exhibition are like essays: playful and partial, intelligent and inquisitive, attentive as they make their experiments and attempts. Narratives – borrowed and invented, replicated and reimagined – are spread like an octopus’s ink throughout this exhibition, embroidering our feeling of time. These artists are (in Araya’s words) “occupied by the lengthy, persistent need to revisit stories that can’t easily be discarded.”* You are invited to take a seat, and to participate in the image-thinking endeavour.

Fyerool Darma with Aleezon, Sharmini Aphrodite, berukera featuring Eric Flower, 'Pathfinder', 2023, shaped plywood, vinyl acrylic (vinylfarbe; Lefranc & Bourgeois), printed polycotton on reupholstered camping chairs with pigments and coating (Samurai2K), 7mil polyester film, LED light, sound, installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and NTU ADM Gallery.

This essay takes the form of an octopus (perhaps a pet), with many tentacles and suction cups. What follows is intended as a companion (to the exhibition) and an invitation (to further reading and image-thinking), rather than as an explanation. Like Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, here I try to avoid “using rigid words to reduce the subtle nuance of art, including both visual art and literature.”¹

Instead of being straightforwardly “about” a discrete topic or theme, ‘The Unfaithful Octopus’ is an exercise and venture in image-thinking. The exhibition attempts to reckon with the kinds of image-thinking that artworks do, focusing on how art thinks about other Art —including works of literature as well as visual culture and the media— as well as how art thinks about narrative and time. ‘The Unfaithful Octopus’ embraces a poetics that is playful yet considered, and guided by slow and careful looking at artworks. This kind of attention necessitates that we take a seat; ample seating is provided throughout the exhibition to “participate in the image-thinking endeavour.”²

Writing about what it means “to be an artist,” Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook proposes that the “state of being an artist means an inability to stay the course for a long stretch of time.”³ Yet she also describes her experience, as an artist and writer, of being “occupied by the lengthy, persistent need to revisit stories that can’t easily be discarded.”⁴

Chulayarnnon Siriphol, ‘Forget Me Not’, 2018, single-channel film with sound, 90 minutes, installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and NTU ADM Gallery.

Digressive yet obsessive, impatient yet persistent: perhaps these seemingly divergent impulses of artmaking can be understood not as contradictory, but rather as complementary qualities that inhere in the practice of image-thinking. Similarly, instead of seeing artworks as objects to think about, the concept of image-thinking invites us to see artworks as tools to think with. Mieke Bal describes image-thinking as an activity “that helps understanding on an integrated level of affect, cognition and sociality, with a strong participation of creativity.”⁵ Her practice as an artist and scholar has been described as “recuperating the visual and audial back into the theoretical-critical.”⁶

“Instead of seeing artworks as objects to think about, the concept of image-thinking invites us to see artworks as tools to think with. ”

‘The Unfaithful Octopus’ is guided by the ideas of Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook and Mieke Bal, but the exhibition also departs from them, and remakes their ideas into new creatures. In this way, the exhibition’s curatorial approach borrows from the irreverence, indirectness and mischievousness that I perceive in all of the artworks that I have gathered here.

Because they are all making use of and thinking about narratives from other artworks or literary texts or the media, these artworks can all be considered a kind of adaptation. But the artists are, as is plainly evident, not attempting to replicate exactly or even closely the various sources that they have studied. These artworks are emphatically unfaithful responses to their artistic, literary and media precedents. Bal argues that “judging adaptations in terms of fidelity is untenable” and proposes instead that we “see the relationship between the later and the earlier text as friends, with loyalty but without exclusivity, with affection but not with blinding passion.”⁷ In this conception, an adaption can be loyal without being faithful; it need not replicate in order to explicate or illuminate. There is an intelligence in form: Araya warns of the folly of “adapting a structure of writing to an artwork that’s incompatible with that structure.”⁸

“In this conception, an adaption can be loyal without being faithful; it need not replicate in order to explicate or illuminate.”

Diem Phung Thi remade by Thao Nguyen Phan, 'seating', c. 1970s remade 2023, installation view. Image courtesy of the artist and NTU ADM Gallery.

The artworks in this exhibition comprise film and moving image, sound and installation, painting and text, seating and embroidery. They respond to sources including classical Thai poetry adapted from Javanese folk talks, and media images of the ongoing Ukraine war (for Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook), Greek mythology and Italian baroque painting (for Mieke Bal), Spanish plays adapted from other Spanish plays (for Ricardo de Baños and Alberto Marro), CCTV surveillance footage from a mall built on the site of a bombing (for CAMP), a 1938 Thai novel and its many cinematic versions (for Chulayarnnon Siriphol), the acoustic and poetic works of a nearly-forgotten historical figure from Johor Bahru recorded in 1917 and stored in a Berlin sound archive (for Fyerool Darma), a modular, abstract chair based on modular, abstract sculptures (for Thao Nguyen Phan’s remaking of designs by Diem Phung Thi), and a 1979 Chinese animation based on a novel that adapts ancient mythological tales that are Indic in origin (for Ian Tee).

CAMP, 'Capital Circus', 2008, single-channel video with sound, 27 minutes. Image courtesy of the artist and NTU ADM Gallery.

These works are unfaithful adaptations of these diverse sources; they reach back into the past to study these various artistic and literary and media precedents, and bring them into the here, the now, the contemporary. Bal suggests “a thought-image” for time: an octopus, with its many tentacles protruding in all directions and sucking up “the cultural nourishment called attention, engagement, dialogue.”⁹ She describes (or rather, imagines) that “the main body of my pet octopus consists of the first temporal aspect, category or idea…: the contemporary.”¹⁰ This is the position in spacetime from which the artists in this exhibition do their image-thinking, including making their unmistakably unfaithful responses to the art, literature and media that they seek out and suck up with the many suction cups on the many tentacles of their practices.

This is an excerpt from Roger Nelson’s curatorial essay published on the occasion of ‘The Unfaithful Octopus’. The exhibition is on view from 12 October to 1 December 2023 at ADM Gallery, Singapore, and thereafter will travel to MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai in early 2024.

Accompanying the exhibition is an online public lecture by Mieke Bal delivered on 20 October 2023, presented by the Art History department in the NTU School of Humanities as part of the NTU Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities series. For details and to register, click here.

To read other writings from the Excerpts series, click here. If you may like to send us texts to consider for the 'Excerpts' series, please email info@artandmarket.net.

Notes
¹Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, I Am An Artist (He Said), trans. Kong Rithdee (Singapore: National Gallery Singapore 2022), 380.
²Mieke Bal, Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022), 7.
³Araya, I Am An Artist (He Said), 9.
⁴Araya, I Am An Artist (He Said), 369.
⁵Bal, Image-Thinking, 8.
⁶Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2021), 17.
⁷Mieke Bal, “Intership: Anachronism between Loyalty and the Case,” The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, ed. Thomas Leitch (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 182-3.
⁸Araya, I Am An Artist (He Said), 380.
⁹Bal, Image-Thinking, 133.
¹⁰Mieke Bal, 133.