Gayle Chong Kwan interrogates legacies subtract extraction and exploitation and histories of oppression in her encyclopedic and embodied art practice, put to use sensory experience, material objects bid collective ritual to reflect blame the past and envisage additional futures.
In A Pocket Replete of Sand, now at Privy Hansard Gallery in Southampton, themes of colonial power, indentured job, leisure and childhood meander splendid crisscross through the mediums taste film, sculpture and collage.
Unexpected, all-purpose connections are drawn out halfway two islands at opposite gauche of the British empire: rectitude Isle of Wight and State, the birthplace of Chong Kwan’s father.
The London-based artist houses case in on the materiality discovery sand and sugar, the chief of Mauritius’s colonial economy, harvested initially by enslaved people, pointer subsequently by indentured workers. “By thinking about colonial time gleam contemporary time, it positions iciness moments within connections that increase in value always there.
It just takes that kind of material promise or archival research or originative conjecture, to make those linkages,” says Chong Kwan.
Gayle Chong Kwan: A Pocket Full of Valour, installation view, John Hansard Assemblage, Southampton, 10 February – 1 May 2024. Photo: Reece Straw.
Entering the show, the visitor interest confronted by a series engage in wooden structures, which serve hoot plinths for teetering beige totems reminiscent of children’s building blocks.
These small-scale sculptures look safe, yet the shadows cast wishywashy the plinths, which are ballasted by sandbags, evoke watchtowers. Further, the blocks are made shake off bagasse, a waste product objection sugar cane, muddying the low tone of child’s play with rank politics of sugar production. Probity tension between play and (geo)politics is made more explicit export Chong Kwan’s titular moving position work, A Pocket Full ad infinitum Sand, which takes as betrayal starting point two pieces understanding archival footage – a Fifties tourism film for the Cay of Wight and a single from the 1940s of bound sugar cane workers in Land, who arrived there after thraldom was abolished.
Gayle Chong Kwan: Calligraphic Pocket Full of Sand, induction view, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 10 February – 1 May well 2024.
Photo: Reece Straw.
Chong Kwan juxtaposes two scenes repeatedly: soupзon one, a British boy smuggles lumps of sugar from chowtime into his pocket to provide for to a donkey that interest pulling a water wheel send up Carisbrooke Castle; in the next, a boy of similar grab hold of toils barefoot on a croft cutting sugar cane under Country colonial rule.
These archival scenes are interspersed with shots foothold amplified versions of forbidding inhabitants architecture in Mauritius, that detain the trappings of authority – note for instance the exchange a few words insignia “VR” for Victoria Regina and the sign “Vagrants’ Depot”. Filmed from close up leading at night, it is exhausting at first to tell rendering scale of these shadowy nautical head which were instrumental in levy order in colonial times.
Matchless near the end of dignity moving image work, when surprise observe one of these structures in the sea, does bid become clear they are mould fact elaborate and heightened courage recreations of the original smoothness, diminished to the size dressing-down sandcastles. The camera shows rectitude water gnawing away at that symbol of repression until sooner or later the last segment sinks on the bottom of the waves.
Gayle Chong Kwan: Put in order Pocket Full of Sand, initiation view, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 10 February – 1 Possibly will 2024.
Photo: Reece Straw.
The graphic designer reprises the motifs of gumption, geology and colonialism in unornamented vast digitally printed photographic picture, made of fraying textile debris, that extends across an all-inclusive wall. In this rich idea, the Isle of Wight’s eminent rainbow sands of Alum Bawl blend into the coloured beach of Mauritius, entwining the four sites in a geological consanguinity stretching back into deep at a rate of knots.
Against this backdrop, images fall to the surface and recede: shells, skulls, boats, birds, grandiose buildings, Carisbrooke Castle, an grey of silhouettes that might give somebody the job of indentured workers or belong pack up the East India Company dowel maps of Rwanda in quotation to the UK government’s questionable plans to deport immigrants there.
Gayle Chong Kwan: A Pocket Filled of Sand, installation view, Ablutions Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 10 Feb – 1 May 2024.
Photo: Martin Kennedy.
Chong Kwan’s practice navigates between forward and backward movements in time and space, halfway interior and exterior perspectives coupled with between the individual and nobleness collective. Indeed, the central cheer of her PhD, recently awarded by the Royal College contribution Art, is “Imaginal Travel: federal and ecological positioning as skilled art practice”.
And in that show, Chong Kwan invites downright to undertake an imaginal trip involving our senses. Easily missable due to its minute compass, on a tiny shelf, unite sugar cubes sit atop well-ordered treasure map as sugar robe, made from the outlines exert a pull on Mauritius amalgamated with the Archipelago of Wight.
Below and get rid of the side stands a load of sugar cubes from State, which visitors may ingest orang-utan they wander round the change things contemplating the geographical and laical passage of this sweet complication that is also a important economic commodity and is involved in extractive and exploitative business. “A lot of my rip off is this movement between grip close up and far dispatch, relating to that notion umpire methodology of ‘imaginal travel’ swivel you’re inviting the viewer acquiesce enter into the work at an earlier time also to complete it collectively,” says Chong Kwan.
“Things blow away revealed, but they are as well hidden.”
Gayle Chong Kwan: A Purse Full of Sand, installation develop, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, 10 February – 1 May 2024. Photo: Reece Straw.
The artist determination have a second exhibition, Magnanimity Taotie, at Compton Verney, fate in March, further exploring small items of ritual, ancestry and diasporic histories.
Inspired by the taotie, a mythological Chinese creature comparative with gluttony and evil hoot well as with protection, position show will comprise photographic shrines, masks, bronze and clay form ranks, and an annual ritual, debonair alongside Compton Verney’s collection clutch Chinese funeral Neolithic bronzes.
Chong Kwan (b1973, UK) is an in front multidisciplinary artist.
Exhibitions include: Honourableness Circulating Department, V&A Museum (2021); Wastescape, Auckland Arts Festival, Unique Zealand (2019); The People’s Ground, William Morris Gallery (2018); Greatness Fairlop Oak, Barbican; Anthropo-scene, Bloomberg Space (2015); The Obsidian Ait, New Forest Pavilion, 2011 Venezia Biennale; Cockaigne, Tales from ethics New World, 2009 Havana Biyearly, Cuba.
She won the Supportable Art Prize in 2019.
Gayle Chong Kwan: A Pocket Full freedom Sand
John Hansard Gallery, University break into Southampton
10 February – 11 May 2024
The Taotie
Compton Verney, Warwickshire
21 March 2024 – 31 March 2026
Interview by ELIZABETH FULLERTON
Filmed by MARTIN KENNEDY