Hell is not a place. Hell is a timeline

Give us a little more time

Niat ingsun amatek ajiku tamengwojo (I intend to put on this magical shield)

We are good at keeping positions

Citizen united, we are the majority 

Imagining the Caring Worlds

Here, a poem is present in front of you. It is written with words from this exhibition, Scoring the Words. These words are either excerpted from works on display or rephrased from artist’s words on the works. The poem connotes the temporal background of each work; it depicts a world in which different contexts, and their space and time, intersect. Both your intimate emotions and the social environment around you shape the reading of this poem. They might also evoke some scenes or sentiments that resonate with all of us. The nuanced emotions and varied deliberations, both nested in the poetic words, expand our thinking. They further generate collective (un)consciousness, senses, and vitality.

Scoring the Words reflects on ‘poetry’, SeMA’s exhibition agenda in 2022. Itself a piece of poetry, the exhibition proposes to perceive artistic practice as a set of poetic language that gives rise to the common imagery, or the affect. It also looks at ‘Asia’ as a field of discourse and expression where the language generated by the artistic practice undulates. Bringing together layers of creative practices that are either grounded in or hovering around Asia into the poetic form, the exhibition thus becomes at once a song for a collective and a language of resilience. Furthermore, through the works of the practitioners – all of whom have observed and articulated the political, social, and cultural movements in Asia that have unfolded synchronously – it questions how the collective consciousness and sensibilities congeal and emerge. 

With fourteen artists, curators, researchers, and musicians, the exhibition does not intend to define a singular regional identity or represent contemporary phenomena as a theme. Rather, it examines the differences between each movement – particularly those of local experiences and characteristics – and questions whether there are particular thoughts and reflections that could be deemed ‘the Asian’. The artistic practices featured in the exhibition pierce through the remnants of history in Asia, including those of colonialism, dictatorship, and developmentalism. They turn these traces into images and signs; they return to us as a language that captures and fights against the underlying contemporary tensions. This language further catalyzes the sense of reality and the common imagery. It renders the modes and methods of collective movements into metaphors, while even conspiring temporary attempts at collectivity. Such movements are based on the state of being ‘connected’ and ‘together’: each of their manifestations will cross borders, prop each other up, and allow us to discover the meaning of the ‘individual’ and the ‘collective’ anew.

Furthermore, the exhibition offers itself to be the site of events as a testing ground for practices that can shape reality through a language of affect. Access Points, for instance, is both a site and a series of public programs that experiments with the possibility of ‘connection’ and ‘contact’. A wide variety of actions and events invite the participants to experience a sense of being together and connected. Here, what emerges is a kind of community, which is less a representation of communal solidarity than a series of simultaneous encounters and reflections. Upon being written, read, and shared, poetry becomes a song. It then turns into a language that connects the nodes of mass consciousness. As such, it is hoped that Scoring the Words, through experiences grounded in the senses and emotions, sparks the sensibility of the ‘common’ albeit for a moment. Through it, we might be able to ask ourselves once again what it means to be together, or what it means to strive for the common.