One of the three exhibitions of SB14

Zoe Butt

Journey Beyond the Arrow offers deeper context to the movement of humanity and the tools that have enabled or hindered its survival. From spiritual ritual to cultural custom, technological process to rule of law, all such practices employ objects and actions that continually move in voluntary and involuntary patterns of discovery, conquest, witness and exile across land and sea.

However, the human journey surrounding the movement of these tools—its cause and effects, its feedback, its ‘echo’—clamors for collective sense amidst textbooks of little historical truth, online archives that are questionably fabricated and governmentally surveilled, and bureaucracies of academic systems of research and rigor that struggle to keep up with the pace of change in their assumed ‘D’isciplines.

In this exhibition, artists reveal the intergenerational impact of a range of physical and psychological ‘tools’, of how the representations and meanings of these tools have shifted as a consequence of colonial exploitation,social and religious conflict or ideological extremism. With their own distinctive approaches, the artists assembled here investigate the historical context of the ‘bow’, which reveals the ‘arrow’ of humanity’s echo—an echo of the diversity of all our activity in relation to language, memory, belief, ritual, and cultural and social practice. The artists’ imaginative retelling of our planet opens us up to what has been overlooked or lost in the echo chamber—a chamber that is economically intertwined yet governmentally divided, often culturally stymied by tradition and insidiously controlled by authoritarianism, a chamber that betrays us when we blindly participate in its algorithmic realm, which pursues quantity instead of meaning.

Journey Beyond the Arrow seeks to illuminate the necessity of exchange and diversity across the globe and throughout human history.

less

28 participants

* new commissions

Khadim Ali *
Antariksa
Shiraz Bayjoo
Adriana Bustos
Kawayan de Guia *
Rohini Devasher
Léuli Eshrāghi
GUDSKUL
Anawana Haloba
Roslisham Ismail (Ise)
Meiro Koizumi *
Jompet Kuswidananto *
Nalini Malani
Lee Mingwei
Neo Muyanga *
Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn *
Phan Thảo Nguyên *
Ho Tzu Nyen *
Ahmad Fuad Osman
Lisa Reihana *
Mark Salvatus
Ampannee Satoh *
Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan *
Kidlat Tahimik *
Xu Zhen
Qiu Zhijie *
Lantian Xie
31st Century Museum of Contemporary Spirit