Someone else’s spit, 2022
a book and a curtain
Produced as part of D6 Culture: Contested Desires Residency, May 2022
The works trace the construction, narration, and conservation of knowledge in the post-colonial canon. Books are vessels as well as documents of power. Just like an author is an integral part of their fiction, historians are part of history and archivists of archives. What appears as extracted or found rigid information is essentially a construction that shapes histories, identities, and realities. The ever-transforming and mutated colonial practice's ferocity and expropriation are concealed in charming vocabulary, sensual imagery, and advanced production tools.
In Someone else’s spit, rexine, once used as tablecloths for bookbinding, is converted into a curtain in a passage point of the library. Having been protection and a division between the fluid present moment and the construction or maintenance of books, they bear witness, as guards, to the documentation of the empirical reality and its re-narration. With the false promise of the spectacular and revelation that a curtain carries, it falls flat on itself; its materiality is all there is, and there is nothing hidden behind it, it is simply cut and re-shaped on both sides. By meditating on romantic imagery from Cyprus’s tourism advertisements, human bodies free-falling are used as a paradigm of commodified simplicity and a desired sense of freedom that is often used to represent liberation, self-rule, and human control over nature. Shapes of bodies were cut out and re-placed on the curtain frozen in movement, ecstatic and free. Surrounded by abstracted landscapes and their offcuts, along with the wear and tear of the material from its past use, the curtain serves as a self-referential quest into the cracks of the economies, structures, and power of narration.
In the book Untitled the information expected in the form of text constantly deviates from the page. The one phrase can only be read once one flicks through the pages, activating the object. Even then, the phrase never appears as a whole as it exceeds the boundaries of its vessel; it’s within and beyond the book, somewhere between reality and its fiction, between the future and the past, the material and the immaterial. Just like the bodies free-falling under the sunlight, the control appears as an illusion, it is destabilized and elusive, existing only in motion.