Spectral Kinship: Tenter Ground, London

Spectral Kinship is a group exhibition curated by Sophie Guo. It brings together six artists whose works give voice to silenced subjects and explore how suppressed histories and unaccommodated desires are made palpable through sound, ritual, materiality and form. Featured artists are: Kent Chan (b. 1984, Singapore; living in Amsterdam), Charmaine Poh (b. 1990, Singapore; living in Berlin), Alison Wing Yin Poon (b. 1996, UK; living in London), Caroline Wong (b. 1986, Malaysia; living in London), Liu Xuan (b. 1991, China; living between Jiangxi & London) and Mingxuan Zhang (b. 1998, China; living in London).

Drawing upon Avery Gordon’s account of haunting as a social force that makes the present waver, the exhibition approaches the spectral as a condition of latency, something hard-to-see, abstract or buried beneath the surface, yet continually seeping across seemingly impermeable temporal and spatial boundaries and reverberating through everyday life. Spanning film, sound, painting, sculpture and kinetic installation, the exhibition attunes to spectral traces and resonances that connect otherwise disparate histories and embodied experience into relation across postcolonial, trans-Asian and trans-tropical sites. It amplifies the sounds through which subjects and collectivities negotiate systems of domination and compose new acoustics of solidarity and resistance. Elsewhere, bodily friction and intimacy, material witness and translation, animist and animalistic forms register experiences that lapse from any predetermined knowledge or taxonomy. Moving between ancestral villages and portal cities, the works forge alternative kinships among migrant women, ancestors, mythological figures, bodies and damaged ecologies, proposing forms of healing that accommodate desires foreclosed by bloodline and the nation-state.

Full press release to follow.