Third Disagreement

Dense-local

Gunalan Nadarajan and Eduardo de Jesús, Curators

It becomes increasingly important in the current context to reflect on the tensions, dislocations, cracks and disruptions that characterize the subject formations that result from the multiple relationships between the ‘local’ and ‘global’. The interactions of the local and global occur in and are mediated by a tension field of existing and emerging spatio-temporal realities that therefore lead to complicated trajectories and outcomes in subject formation. Indeed, today we are experiencing new territories with new forms of presence (Weissberg), where our immediate sense of place is often a dynamic construction that is formed with multiple references, both local and global. With this reimagining, we are in a position to counterpose a notion of “territories-network” where there is a dispersed and spatiotemporally interpenetrated notion of territory against the conventional logic of “territories-zone”, which is policed by borders, laws and nationalistic notions of nation-state and territorial integrity. The notion of ‘territories-network’ is also intimately allied to recovering the ‘local’ as the active mediator and locus rather than as a stage-set for globalization. In short, it redeems the local as the ‘locus’ of globalization; as the active producer of the global rather than its incidental outcome. Accordingly, it is proposed that we review the local from another perspective, one that is no longer haunted or cornered by the global in an asymmetrical power relationship. One connected to an idea of simultaneous expansion and intensification, a dense local built in a crowed and thick reality that is infiltrated with trajectories toward and influences from outside and where an “outside” even becomes difficult to articulate. Within this dense local, distant and near are relative concepts not because they represent different spatial dimensions, but because they are experienced at all times together thus temporalizing distance and proximity. Temporalities that emerge from a dense local translate into simultaneous multitemporality linking past, present and future operating in an equally fluid multiterritoriality. And even while being locked into (and in some cases, out of) connectivity by the proliferation of information and communication technologies, in this dense local, the immediate (if there is a sense of this at all) is as important as the mediate(d); where everything is only experienced as mediated by the density that presses everything against everything else in overwhelming immediacy. The curatorial selection for this exhibition has been made with a view to explore and deliberate on this notion of the dense local rather than to exemplify it. The artworks are drawing on highly located concerns while reflecting dense interpenetration by and problematization of global forces.