About
The group exhibition presents the lens-based artwork of Susie Wong, Green Zeng and Zulkhairi Zulkiflee. It contemplates the postcolonial term ‘worlding’ coined by theorist Gayatri Spivak to describe how the colonial gaze shapes representation. In particular, this entails a process where knowledge and reality are entangled within colonial structures. Here, the title ‘worldly dis-position’ alludes to a sense of ‘deferral’ that is enacted through the prefix ‘dis’ or understood as ‘apart’.
In Susie Wong’s work, coconut trees are engaged as a recurring motif. Wong reflects on popular Western films and literature, where the tropical tree functions as a “parenthesis”. Here, these tropical markers serve as witnesses to place and story — autonomous objects that act as withdrawn viewfinders. In her book, The Idea of the Coconut, Wong quips about the island, “The island is not real. Coconut trees conjure up the paradise, the tropical, the Other.”
Displaced on a fictitious Southern Island of Singapore called Pulau Sebakau (Sebakau Island), Green Zeng proposes an imaginary narrative revolving around an exiled protagonist named PB. PB lives with a Malay community native to the island, where he reflects on his interaction with the islanders as both an Other and Othered. Zeng imagines PB through letters on postcards, writing them on photographic material belonging to the late Singaporean photographer, Teo Yen Teck. The mediation of the photos, both as lenses and stimuli, speaks of displacement and longing that is both physical and psychological.
Zulkhairi Zulkiflee reflects on an uncanny displacement through Singapore, Michigan, a ‘ghost town’ swallowed by the dunes of Lake Michigan’s shoreline. He contemplates the placename, which is awkwardly divorced from his understanding of home. By reflecting on the notion of the twin, doppelganger and uncanny, he attempts to trail the ‘emergence’ of Singapore as a free-floating concept while deferring any particular closure.
‘Worldly dis-position’ reflects on place, memory and identity as one entangled within a postcolonial context. The exhibition questions the inherent notion of spaces we inhabit, where positions straddle and are constantly deferred through both connection and separation with the world.
Main artwork detail: Zulkhairi Zulkiflee, Unhomely, 2024.