Of course, Quincey’s opiate-fueled reflections of Asia as an imagined site of mystic sublimity have all the familiar trappings of a particular system of thought that has dominated Western representations of Asia in the past few centuries: the power of the gaze to fabricate and invent an eroticized and exoticized Other. For a large part, the rhetoric of Paradise Lost, the inaugural exhibition of the newly established Centre for Contemporary Art (CCA) in Singapore, plays to this outdated but still oft-studied dialectic with three major video works by Fiona Tan, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Zarina Bhimji, all of which seek to question the politics of migration, cultural identity, and transnational boundaries.

Fiona Tan. Disorient, 2009 (film still); double-screen video installation; color HD installation, 5:1 surround, 2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 computers, 2 surround amplifiers, surround speakers. Courtesy of Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem.

Fiona Tan. Disorient, 2009 (film still); double-screen video installation; color HD installation, 5:1 surround, 2 HD-cam safety masters, 2 HD projectors, 2 computers, 2 surround amplifiers, surround speakers. Courtesy of Frith Street Gallery, London. Photo: Per Kristiansen.

Fiona Tan’s Disorient (2009) is a two-channel production commissioned for the Dutch Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale that contrasts discordant perceptions of Asia. The first video delineates a fictional but richly textured space curated to showcase objects found and gleaned from an exotic Other. Accompanied by a voice-over narration of Marco Polo’s travel accounts that were written at the end of the thirteenth century, Tan’s theatrical set—designed to emulate the exotic appeal of a cabinet of curiosities—imagines Polo’s lived experience of the material world, with shelves filled to the brim with figurines, taxidermied beasts, and other unnamed ornaments. But if the cabinet of curiosities is often meant to provide a visual narrative for the classification and analysis of the material world, Tan’s enormous Kunstkammer seems solely designed to disorient and to celebrate the act of collection for its own sake, highlighting perhaps the West’s centuries-old unilateral perception of the East. Yet the pursuit of capturing atavistic myth, so intricately drawn out in the first video, is dashed away by the jarring contemporary footage of the second video. The unsentimental, poverty-stricken urban landscape of East Asia, derelict and in disrepair, concurrently provides an ironic counterpoint to Polo’s romanticized configuration of these same regions, and bluntly questions the ideology presented in the first screen.

Zarina Bhimji. Yellow Patch, 2011 (film still); single-screen installation; HD Blu-ray and Dolby 5.1; 35mm film transferred to HD; 29:43. Courtesy of the Artist.

Zarina Bhimji. Yellow Patch, 2011 (film still); single-screen installation; HD Blu-ray and Dolby 5.1; 35mm film transferred to HD; 29:43. Courtesy of the Artist.

Zarina Bhimji’s Yellow Patch (2011) is a slow, delicious cinematic exploration of architecture, hinterlands, and destinations that utilizes the camera’s ability to create a disjuncture between image and referent. By carefully correlating the moving image to affective sounds, Yellow Patch eschews cerebral contextualization and factual presentation in favor of visual sensations created by mise-en-scène where interiors are merely obliquely equated with individual and collective memory. Like reticent sentinels of a time long past, monuments and buildings serve as Bhimji’s markers, which foreground the migration and movement of peoples and cultures in the British colonial subcontinent of the late 19th to the early 20th century. The passing of time is marked by abandoned buildings, peeling paint, and decaying walls, as the desolate urban landscapes—elegiacally softened by slow-moving shots and framing—carries the tumultuous weight of a nation’s history.

Trinh T. Minh-ha. Surname Viet Given Name Nam, 1989 (film still); 16mm; 108 min. Courtesy of Moongift Films.

Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989) tackles issues of documenting, translation, and interviewing within the familiar territory of cultural voyeurism, identity politics, and the construction of memory. Through a series of montages, archival footage, voice-over narrations, obscure Vietnamese proverbs, and English subtitles, Surname Viet Given Name Nam uses the power of fragmentary storytelling to explore aspects of Vietnamese reality as seen through the lives of women in Vietnam and the United States. The camera shots are deliberately unsteady as though wielded by an amateur’s hand, yielding information that is only coherent enough to glean partial information of the injustices that women suffer. The staged quality of these “ethnographic” interviews becomes more pronounced as the film progresses, until we realize that Trinh’s deliberate intention is not for us to misconstrue their halting speech as shyness or them as people struggling to speak in a different language, but rather the uncertainty of amateur actors who are in fact Vietnamese women living in the United States. Surname Viet Given Name Nam redefines identity as an interview experience, a quasi-fictional way of encountering the ethnographic self through the act of speaking and recollecting. But Trinh’s feminist critical discourse also raises questions that strike at the core of identity politics: What is selfhood and how should (or can) it be represented?

Seen in this light, Paradise Lost does not merely showcase narratives of displacement but also validates the notion that encoded within people are an indeterminate amount of political and cultural selves. As a consequence, identity—whether personal or collective—is at best too slippery to be pinned down by a taxonomic and digestible checklist of authentication. Certainly, the exhibition makes a convincing case of the value of exploring diasporic perspectives and the global aesthetic influences that come into play, despite the recurrent eagerness of such exhibitions to assimilate the oft-explored hallmarks of post-colonial discourse. At every turn, we are constantly reminded that the show is an unrelenting exercise in probing issues of memory and identity (which seem to be recurrent obsessions of regions that have a colonial past), and of the artifice of such illusions. There are questions heaped upon questions, but no ready answers as we are left to ponder the politics of conflicting narratives and sensitivities in each installation. As acutely sensitive to such concepts as the exhibition has proven to be, perhaps the most unsettling realization it leaves is that representation—rewritten from the perspective of an object that has always been represented—obfuscates as much as it reveals.

Paradise Lost is on view at the Centre for Contemporary Art at the Gillman Barracks through March 30, 2014.

Images by Ruth Clark, courtesy of CCA Press

Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan are Glasgow-based artists who have been working collaboratively for fifteen years. Direct serious action is therefore necessary which runs from 2 October to 13 November 2010 was commissioned in response to the function, history and architecture of the Centre for Contemporary Arts (CCA), Glasgow. The choreography of individual pieces – from text to objects – circulated before and during the exhibition comprise the artwork, rather than the individual pieces themselves. Tatham and O’Sullivan draw from local histories to create works on rituals within art making and viewing, to question the parameters of contemporary art. Taking cue from Joseph Kosuth on his idea that art is a kind of proposition commenting on art, one is confronted with propositions related to site and structure, through their work.

The notion of a site, as both imaginary and physical locations are probed into, as the works take reference from or call attention to the mythical site of Scotland’s Loch Ness monster and the immediate context of CCA as historical architecture and exhibition site. As a creature whose physical absence creates an enduring mythic quality, imaginations surrounding the Loch Ness monster take on monumental stature, through large totemic structural pieces winding their way from the entrance through the cafe into the galleries. They draw attention to the architecture of CCA, where refurbishment in the 1990s revealed core sections of the Victorian-era Greek-styled building. Placed both outside and inside the galleries, the juxtaposition questions the function of spaces in relation to art. While in the cafe, they appear as architectural features for visitors to circulate around. When placed in the conventions of a white-walled gallery, they align themselves to our expectations as works of art to be observed.

Image by Alan Dimmick, courtesy of CCA Press

Direct serious action is therefore necessary disrupts structures and the sets of established relationships within a work of art and its presentation, through investigating the role of text and rituals. In contrast to the didactic role of language within exhibitions, the written language in this case appears as a work of art in itself. A folded yellow handout with an image of a man on a horse is circulated prior to the exhibition, and is paired with text containing a first-person tirade in Glaswegian street language, of the blind eye cast by politicians  to the situation of the working class. The title and language of the narration evokes an attitude, and seems dislocated thematically from the exhibition, playing against norms regarding how text serves as a filter for art. Individual labels for the individual pieces are absent in the galleries, and labels for the black and white photographs of Glasgow scenes, are visible only in the handout circulated before the exhibition and are placed in a way to describe the image of the man on the horse. In doing so, it questions the extent to which text produces art and the point at which a work is regarded as art when it enters a gallery space. The use of repetition – through a repeated phrase in the text, geometric patterns on the sculptural pieces, and repeated prints in the black and white photographs – serve more as connotative than aesthetic devices, in revealing the nature of their work in expressing systems in art.

Tatham (1971) and O’Sullivan (1967) met as MFA students at the Glasgow School of Art, and are both research fellows at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen, Scotland. Recent solo exhibitions include Does your contemplation of the situation fuck with the flow of circulation at Eastside Projects, Birmingham and You can take it as a thing or you can take it as a thing, La Salle de Bains, Lyon. They participated in Selective Memory in the Scottish Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 2005, which toured to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.