Fracture/Fiction

We are delighted to present Fracture/Fiction: Selections from the ILHAM Collection as our first collection show since the inception of ILHAM Gallery in 2015. The exhibition features 93 works of contemporary art by 45 artists from ILHAM Gallery’s growing permanent collection. Presenting a wide array of voices from both Southeast Asia and South Asia, the exhibition surveys the innovative ways artists have responded to the pressing social conditions of our time ranging from climate change to migration, through a broad spectrum of practices and approaches.

The range of geographies, socio-political contexts, topics, and themes presents viewers with new, unexpected juxtapositions between many rich narratives.

As one example, Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich’s bamboo and rattan sculpture, which was inspired by the seed pod of the endangered Beng tree, is placed near to a wing made of sickles, a seminal work by the Philippines’ Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan.

Fracture/Fiction presents works by prominent Malaysian artists, including Wong Hoy Cheong, Simryn Gill, and Yee I-Lann alongside international peers, among them, Shilpa Gupta (India), Ronald Ventura (Philippines), and Eko Nugroho (Indonesia). This collection reflects ILHAM Gallery’s commitment to presenting not only Malaysian art, but all forms of art which hold unique historical, personal and political perspectives. The inclusion of regional works exemplifies ILHAM Gallery’s mission to serve as a platform for both Malaysians and Malaysian art to participate in larger, regional conversations.

The ILHAM Collection’s debut is an impressive show of 93 works by 45 artists from across Southeast Asia and the larger Asian region. Yet the premise of the exhibition also takes a more modest turn, as it, almost poignantly, chooses to reflect on the barest elements of what gives the art its power: “fractures” and “fictions”. There is no overarching narrative to guide interpretation here, only an insistence on respecting the complexities on display and a trust in the visitor’s own sense of curiosity.

Fracture/Fiction affords its visitors the pleasures of free rein. Pertinent pieces of information are shared succinctly in the wall texts, serving as clues rather than attempts at explanation. Even in the arrangement of the artworks, rather than composing the hang according to some strict curatorial or theoretical agenda, the pieces are situated according to their visual and tactile needs.

There is a return to the simple instinct of placing a work where it can best “breathe” in the compositional possibilities of the gallery space. This intuitive approach has led to some gratifying results. Arresting the visitor at the exhibition’s main entrance is a piece from the Cambodian artist Sopheap Pich, a large bamboo and rattan sculpture, shaped like human lungs, which is placed near a sculpture of a wing made of sickles by Filipino artists Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan. The allusion to both the waves of breathing and of flight are a visual delight.

One of the underrated pleasures of a permanent collection is in how little control the artist has over their work after procurement. Some artists have strict rules for display, but compared to a solo exhibition, where the art is meticulously situated and prepared by artist, curator and writer — procured art, unless exceptional because of its iconic art historical status, is usually less protected.

In the first light of the opened storage door, it will sit alongside other objects of comparable esteem, torn away from the myths and (con)texts of a contained exhibition, subjected indifferently to contrasting shades of light, receding and recurring over time and in public memory.

An artwork is always a slightly altered creature in any collection, which is to mean, simply, that if a permanent collection was a dinner party, works of art, though all elite guests, are precariously seated in an unfamiliar environment among strangers. A new vulnerability is exposed, and with it, a new phenomenology in which to encounter the work, to understand the artist and even challenge the narratives it has carried.

In a display crafted by instinct, the visitor must then do the same and trust their own. An exhibition of a permanent collection, such as Fracture/Fiction, offers more than a series of encounters with individual works of art, it can also reveal an infinite range of connections and juxtapositions between objects that the gallery has entrusted to the visitor. This may seem daunting, but it is also precious. How often does a gallery allow such intimacy between the visitor and the work?

After the arrival of modernist art, contemporary art has earned the privilege of indirectness. Today, much of the pleasure of art and the genius of the artist is rated in how cleverly they play with ambiguity in a world, we assume, so certain of its logic and logos. Ironically, for all this celebration of incertitude, it has also birthed new anxieties to account for art in art criticism and writing.

To elucidate an experience with art, however, it is important to carry this common belief with some vigilance, even discomfort. There can be a visceral duty expected of art, even from artists themselves, that cannot be put into words, and often the strength of a work is precisely its ability to trespass textual boundaries. It is not often clear where the text ends and art begins.

A collection such as Fracture/Fiction escapes such conspiracies. Simply by virtue of belonging to the same cohort, each work can challenge another’s narrative, if not simply enhance and dimensionalised its neighbours’ themes and concerns. The visitor is therefore able to do more than regard finished work and decide on its aesthetic pleasure, but also gather a true sense of art’s “afterlife”.

How will time judge some works of art? How was it situated and have the situations changed? With frequent revisits (the serious, truly curious visitor revisits), one will be able to hear a conversation that stretches across regions, belief systems and materialities, made more powerful in this “unprotected” form. The visitor, then, should not be intimidated, but delight in the possibilities before them, and perhaps the task of the art writer now is not so much to explain the work, but to eavesdrop, and suggest in a few instances just how these new conversations in the collection may be heard.