Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.
… Thinking again about space and location, I hear the statement ‘our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting’; a politicization of memory that distinguishes nostalgia, that longing for something to be as once it was, a kind of useless act, from that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present. - bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness”, 1989. |
The focus of the works made during the STPI VAP Residency (2021) is about the transformative acts against forgetting. Ideas around intimate/invisible labour within the home were used as departure points.
Within the context of the explorations in the residency, the opening quotes by bell hooks served as a reminder of the conscious effort on my part to position myself to speak from within the margin, or specifically the margin as what she defines as “a liminal position” that is full of possibility, difficulty, difference and self-criticality. One of the key questions that I was obsessed with was whether love has texture. The forms of circle, squares (the grid) and triangles (from the patchwork & table runner) were unpacked and put together afterwards to examine the tensions between the gaps or the limits of language (visual or otherwise), and the question of belonging. One set of works were more formal in terms of material, textual elements, whereas another set of craft-based (fabric and paper) ones highlighted the everyday act of repair and the medium of storytelling. The complex relationship as simultaneously an outsider-looking-in and an insider-looking-out, being a Sarawakian who has spent half my life away from my hometown as well as in Singapore was also being considered. Equally significant was the ambivalent relationship I have with my mother in terms of having the voice to speak about things around them due to the lack of vocabulary or language. Some of the works also embodied and looked into the struggles between us and the (im)possibility of finding common grounds. For the newer production of parts of the works, I was also taking care to mediate between the flows of capital and labour, and the various persons and communities that were engaged as crafters. Image: I Love You (Pear), Laser-etched acrylic, 30 x 70 x 6cm, 2021. |
Detail of The big and small of things (with Ariyana Samuji), 2021, Handstitched rosettes, 187 x 143 cm, Unique. © Adeline Kueh / STPI. Image courtesy of the Artist and STPI.
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Detail of Forgetting and Remembering (Orange), 2021, Silk thread stitching and screenprint on artist's handkerchiefs, Framed: 54.2 x 84 x 3.8 cm, Unique. © Adeline Kueh / STPI. Image courtesy of the Artist and STPI.
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One cool evening (I), 2021, Screenprint on fabric, 185.5 x 182 cm, Unique. © Adeline Kueh / STPI. Image courtesy of the Artist and STPI.
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