Public Spirits attempts to bring into conversation the thoughts and
operations of different political subjects and organizations in Asia’s social,
cultural, and scientific realms

Wars, massacres, segregation and violence have never faded away from human
history. Ever since the Age of Enlightenment, the optimistic quest for
modernity has been but a transient occurrence. We seem to live in fragmented,
disjointed and concurrent times, at the very border and intersection of
past, present and future. The antagonisms in the fields of representation and
politics, whether in the realm of religion, State governance, or processes of
modernization, has never been resolved by any revolution. We live in an epoch
where time difference, time-lag, tradition and modernity are juxtaposed and
engaged in battle. Yet, globalization has been transferring and extending the
project of modernity to Asia and the entire world. Within this historical and geographical
conjuncture, the pursuit of this project seen as a way to overcome
a delay in modernisation coexists with discussion on the failure of modernity.
Public Spirits attempts to bring into conversation the thoughts and
operations of different political subjects and organizations in Asia’s social,
cultural, and scientific realms. Many countries in Asia claim to be founded on
a modernized governance that is neutral, rational, efficient, and scientific, in
order to attain the goals of Developmentalism and modernization through the
means of bureaucratic legislation, societal order, regulation of national borders,
and the categorization and survey of population and natural resources.
However, these technologies of governance are often either based on modern
administrative systems founded upon old colonial suzerains, or a crude imitation
of the former. In that sense, the history and the shadow of colonization
has never faded away.

To obtain a position of recognition and affirmation on the global stage, the
great nation state building modernization projects are present throughout
Asia and operate through systemized violence, industrial production efficiency,
as well as the control and regulation of nature. In the meantime, traditional
cultures, agrarian production and social structures must be destroyed in order
for society to modernize. Thus, the various counter powers, like religious
beliefs, the reverence for untamed nature, traditional forms of production and
their respective layman cultures, different types of spiritual faiths, political
action and cultural production in the symbolic realm, continue to engage in
a back-and-forth battle for the coexistence of complex approaches to life
and resources: a resistance from the obliteration imposed by rationalism that
summon a return of the ghosts and the spirits.

Public Spirits acknowledges a public sphere where different individuals
and groups take political action based on a multitude of beliefs, from traditions
to faiths, and where the asymmetry of power relations within such complexity
is negotiated and subverted. Consequently, this exhibition presents
long-term research and projects that 21 artists and collective groups have
conducted on the governing technologies of modernized nations. Showcasing
fragments and fictionalized representations of history and memory, many of
the projects have pieced together the micro-narratives of the individuals that
constitute the diversity of histories and stories that exist but are lost in the
foreground of official narratives. Most of the practices also make present the
network connections and levels of interchange built on the values of collaboration
and self-organization. In the symbolic domain, where mythology, documentary
history, scientific research, anthropology and sociology interlace,
artists are trying to reconstruct a system of signification, using imagination
and sentiment to portray not only conditions of survival and bodily memories,
but also the obstacles and crusades that repeatedly occur. The systems of
signs and representation present in the works and practices in this exhibition
are acutely direct and often free from embellishment. This is due to how in reality
art production, with its revelation of political subjectivities, or even just
the freedom of expression, has never been completely or truly liberated.
An exhibition can be regarded as a one-off initiative and as a platform for
construction. Conceived as an action, an exhibition includes the practices and
conversations of different agents within a political sphere, their imagination
projected and reflected onto each other, as well as the collaboration and
negotiation necessary to fulfil an intention. As a cross-regional project, Public
Spirits invites practitioners in Asia, Europe and North America to produce collaboratively
– artists, writers, curators and collectives all joined in completing
this creative act. This temporary and flexible model for collaboration can be
seen as reflective of contemporary modes of production present throughout
different regions of Asia. Particularly in areas where public resources and
infrastructure are lacking, art workers such as the participating artists Art
Labor and lifepatch often form collectives as a way to produce work collaboratively,
to support transnational exchange and develop social networks as
a mode of strategically supplementing the flaws and present-ness of reality.
In many Asian nations, these self-organized communities serve as real agents
of political action. More precisely, this is due to the fact that many of the people
are not granted the status to participate in the mechanics of state sovereignty
through political means. The status of the political subject therefore, can be blurry
and hard to define. Before material structural foundations, cultural infrastructure
and political systems are able to reach maturity in a civil society, these communities
must – through various forms of collaboration, negotiation and struggle
in the public domain – attain an action and idea that is ephemeral and may never
be more than transitory.

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• Public Spirits
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