Everything But Gold (2017)
In Everything But Gold, this series of works by Adeline Kueh deals a personal item, the paper beads that span from June 1963 to present-day Singapore context. 1963 was the year Adeline’s parents began their courtship: they started making the paper beads from calendars available to them readily. By the time they got married in 1966, they had enough beads for their matrimonial home. As she saw them as an emblem of the parents’ love for each other, Adeline saved three strands from the bead curtain used in their various homes before she left Sarawak in 1990 for her undergraduate studies. These beads travelled with her throughout until she set up a home with her Singaporean partner in 1999. While the beads did come apart on and off before being glued back together, an accident by her son caused a dozen beads to unravel in January 2016.
Her decision to open up the beads revealed a surprise – she saw for the first time that the beads were time capsules. They bore the traces of time passing, as well as having been made of calendars in 1963 which significantly, was the year Sarawak & North Borneo joined the Federation of Malaysia (on September 16, 1963). These beads are literally worth their weight in gold for the artist who has moved more than 26 times before she turned 30. These precious paper beads have been weighed & averaged out to 7 grams each. An encounter with some inherited gold pieces around that time (for the artist’s son) & the ways in which the beads are stand-ins for personal histories.
This alchemical process will be documented and presented alongside the unraveled beads in the form of video, photography & sculptural objects. In conservation circles, it has been said that everything but gold corrodes over time except gold. Here, love – like gold – transcends time & changes afforded by time, and in this case, for more than half a century.
Her decision to open up the beads revealed a surprise – she saw for the first time that the beads were time capsules. They bore the traces of time passing, as well as having been made of calendars in 1963 which significantly, was the year Sarawak & North Borneo joined the Federation of Malaysia (on September 16, 1963). These beads are literally worth their weight in gold for the artist who has moved more than 26 times before she turned 30. These precious paper beads have been weighed & averaged out to 7 grams each. An encounter with some inherited gold pieces around that time (for the artist’s son) & the ways in which the beads are stand-ins for personal histories.
This alchemical process will be documented and presented alongside the unraveled beads in the form of video, photography & sculptural objects. In conservation circles, it has been said that everything but gold corrodes over time except gold. Here, love – like gold – transcends time & changes afforded by time, and in this case, for more than half a century.
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, 1989.
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