solo show at POINTSMAN artspace

curated by Skylar Kwan and Emily Cheung

5-29 July 2024

 

Curatorial Statement

During texting, calling and online meetings, we seek dearly the presumed presence of another, but our relationships have taken digital form, and so has intimacy. It finds its way through screens, microphones, cameras, often pixelated, transformed, reproduced, perhaps deferred and distorted, mediated by external signals, and tangled up with the materiality of digital spaces. 

 

ghosted lingers in this suspension of perfect connections, another’s full presence, and traces the broken paths of intimacies -  what has been unsettled? How does the rupture haunt us?

 

In the makeup of digital spaces are malfunctions like network latency and glitches. Unstable and rough, digital connections embody a ghostly texture comparable to Derrida’s hauntology, reinterpreted by Mark Fisher, where time escapes linear passage. Amidst our feeling of intimacy, the past that is no longer leaks in as it returns in cycles, marking also the constant failure, to arrive at a future not there yet. The binary of presence and absence has come to an end as they dissolve into each other, in the photos taken, the text messages, the video calls, the digital and its hyper presence. But we continue to ask, how has intimacy taken shape in such ambiguity? 

 

Through the five artworks by Tate, the disorientation materialises. As she engages with the haunting materiality of digital spaces, the long distance relationships with close ones, fragmented memories of places and senses of belongings, video calls in intimate spaces, and text archives are recalled. How much do our identities, relationships and memories mirror this ghostly realm and what urges for new interpretations? 

 

ghosted explores the complex evolving dynamics of digital intimacy which underpins relationships today, channelling perhaps a shared angst of our digital times. 

 

How close have we been? 

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