The gaps/silences in between words exchanged
Singapore-based curator Louis Ho on silence,...
“Between Conversations” takes “the interstitial implications within the space/s of conversation” as its starting point. Can you explain what this means?
The most common understanding of a conversation is a dialogue between two or more interlocutors, but all too often what goes unsaid and unheard lingers as an absent presence, a spectre haunting the gaps between the articulated. That’s a fancy way of saying that what a conversation omits – structurally, programmatically – is no less significant than what it pronounces. The silences, the interstices between utterances if you will, are more often than not fraught with meaning.
Also, conversations are platforms not just for communication, but exercises in the operation and imbalance of power: who gets to speak and to whom, who gets to say what, when, where. These things happen meta-conversationally: between words, between dialogues.
How did you convey an abstract, ephemeral concept like ‘spaces in between’ curatorially?
One can’t. Exhibitions are relational in that respect: you set up a space, an occasion for an exchange to happen. You present works in a certain manner and within certain frameworks, and the viewer derives from those juxtapositions and contexts what s/he will. Or not.
Is communication possible between artists and artist/observer, or do you adhere to Derridian theory that true meaning is interminably deferred?
Nothing quite so serious as Derrida! I don’t know that meaning is always deferred. Structurally, language may occlude absolutes perhaps, but at the level of the everyday – which includes art viewing – we negotiate the process of constructing meaning, of assigning significance, from moment to moment, however, one-sided those acts may be.
“conversation is collaborative..”
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