Slippery Tongues Sliding Horizons

curator_ ONG Jo-Lene

Korean(한국어)

Composed in the key of ‘open’—one of the five keywords in Five Inclusion Tactics for Seven Curators: empowering, supportive, cooperative, open, fair—Slippery Tongues Sliding Horizons speaks with experiences of navigating multiple languages and existing between fixed categories. These experiences common for migrant, diaspora, and peripheral communities, create embodied liminal knowledge articulating a way of relating to the world that alter the borders and categories previously structured by western-modern knowledge. This series brings together moving image and text that perform a poetry of inclusion—gestures of opening up singular narratives and attending to porous boundaries—by Sung Hwan Kim (in musical collaboration with David Michael DiGregorio), Liz Ferrer & Bow Ty (Niña), Jesse Chun, Nina Djekić, Isola Tong, Okui Lala, Nasrikah, & PERTIMIG, along with new commissions from Yun Choi and Finn Maätita & Jerrold Saija. Speaking against western universalism, Slippery Tongues Sliding Horizons re-articulates concepts of ‘language’, ‘knowledge’, ‘traditions’, and ‘technology’ in our own terms and re-imagines shared horizons betwixt and beyond South Korea, the United States, Maluku, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the Netherlands.

Marginality: who names? whose fringes? An else an elsewhere that not merely lies outside the centre but radically striates it.— Trinh T. Minh Ha

As a Malaysian of Hokkien Chinese heritage who grew up around the energies of Southeast Asia, a region straddling the historic maritime trade route connecting the Arab peninsula, Indian subcontinent, China, and Europe, it was not perchance but inevitable that my curatorial practice connected with keyword ‘open’. Contested and malleable, Southeast Asia is a highly heterogenous region in terms of religion, ethnicity, culture, language, politics, and geography. This lack of a unifying characteristic or narrative makes it hard to be culturally legible outside of the region. The desire (and need) to be legible was not something that I experienced until I relocated to Amsterdam. Here, code-switching, translating, explaining the differences and shared roots of Bahasa Indonesia, Bahasa Malaysia, and Tagalog, questioning how I should say that I am Malaysian but not Malay… became an everyday thing. Very quickly, the desire for legibility fatigues and starts to oscillate with the right to invoke opacity. This is a condition shared by those with bi-cultural, diasporic, and immigrant backgrounds particularly those with racialised identities. At this juncture, we could turn to identity as modality—the pre-modern way of living closely with flows of sea in maritime Southeast Asia has fostered a vocabulary open to syncretism, hybridity, and constant renewals. This mode of relating to the world where we can and should belong to each other can be sensed in the Malay term “tanah-air” Akin to homeland but connecting with notions of both land (“tanah”) and water (“air”), it suggests a more fluid and elemental notion of belonging and unbelonging.

Resonant with this linguistic sign is a musical composition by Isang Yun, Five Pieces for Piano (1958) that serves as a motif for curatorial director Honggyun Mok in developing Five Inclusion Tactics for Seven Curators. Isang Yun was a Korean-German composer who not synthesised musical characteristics of East Asia and Europe (formal, structural, textural, rhythmic, and pitch organisational factors) but also drew from broader philosophical concepts such as Buddhist philosophy and European avant-garde movement¹. By densely unifying the materials, they become borderless and indiscernible. It is with these orientations, around land-water and polyphonic music, that I extended invitations to contribute works and insights that form and inform this project.

….
lightly, the way one might kiss a grenadebefore hurling it into the night’s mouth.
Maybe the tongue is also a key.
Yikes.
— Ocean Vuong

Three keys to Slippery Tongues Sliding Horizons

Having lived in South Korea, Hong Kong, Canada, and the United States, New York-based artist Jesse Chun studies systems of language, legibility, and the poetics ofunlanguaging. In the video SULLAE 술래, moving images of a precolonial Korean women’s Moon dance, gang gang sullae(강강술래) are interwoven with consonants of the English language, Hangeul (한글) and English text, various index pages from intonation books, white noise, and word-censor bleep. In SULLAE 술래, the Moon encircles a multiplicity of systems, languages and untranslatable memories — simultaneously transcribing and unlanguaging, so one can shout into the night, under its warm shadow.^²

Born and based in the Netherlands, Finn Maätita and Jerrold Saija are two artists who came together in this project to collaborate on a new work based on their shared interest in Moluccan colonial history and indigenous knowledge. Located at the intersection of Oceania and Southeast Asia, the Maluku islands was termed Spice Islands because clove, mace, and nutmeg was exclusively found there. The sago palm tree is still widely found and used in Maluku. Using 3D render and a deep dream algorithm, the artists created a portal to the myths, stories, and songs about the pohon Sagu: an Ancestor of Maluku. Reviving many tongues that speak of the Sagu, Di Mata Pohon : Ancestral Download III invites you to listen to the Palm’s plentiful entanglements with an open heart, friendly to the Sagu’s spirit.

Entering the space of Yun Choi’s video installations feels like stepping into the deluge of a person’s stream of consciousness—like a Clarice Lispector novel unfolding as objects, with multiple screens constantly updating in the background, and coordinates anchored around South Korea and Amsterdam. Her practice looks into the absurd emotional conflict caused by overlapping and lagging timelines of rapidly developing society and its historical oppressions; with the complex sensations of alienation, awkwardness, and attachment as essential aspects. Choi aims to dissolve the boundaries of conventional/colonial perspectives by eliciting feelings of disorientation, shapeshifting into multi-body beings, and inviting sincere superstitious beliefs.³ In her studio in Rijksakademie, we talk about the double-bind of legibility and othering faced by racialised identities, about living in a place where we fully understand what is around us, and the exciting prospect of organising a non-verbal artist talk. Choi’s new commission Digging In will embrace what she has been doing and feeling in Amsterdam and premier in early 2023.

Korean(한국어)