Paracosmos

Paracosmos propels the viewer into a parallel world – a space of otherness that is recognisable but unfamiliar. Shaped by Shinto ideas of interconnectivity, the site-responsive work is situated in the circular stairwell of the Singapore Art Museum, a central transition space that connects two floors. Here, the ‘membrane’ of hand-cut mirrors dissolves the definition between foreground and background by dissipating the single image into an explosion of reflections. A space of simultaneity, and eternally liminal, the mirror was core to philosopher Michel Foucault’s concept of the heterotopia as a kind of zone that could encompass other sites. Yet munificence can also be deceptive, and like a mirror that throws a warped or skewed reflection, heterotopias can disturb and distort the spaces held in their embrace. The mirror reveals itself as a paradoxical device: able to hold every other image by having no inherent image, it canenfold an ‘everywhere’ by being a ‘nowhere’ in itself.