04 December 2021 – 02 February 2022

Curators

Nan Xi/ Xingyun Wang/ Chu zhou/ Yuhang Zhang

Artists

Manuel Graf/ Ho Rui An/ Lin Yi-Chi/ Jongkwan PAIK/ Tzu-An Wu/ Tan Jing

The word liminal comes from Latin “limen”, meaning threshold, the state of in-between.

Liminal space is a transitional space that has been abandoned, a corridor between this reality and the next, a time between what is and what will be, a permanent present frozen in uncertainty. It is the sound of alarm we incorporate into our dreams just before waking up, a shopping mall or a museum at night, a temporary hospital built in ten days, a hotel reconstructed for quarantine purposes…

Haunted by the sick, the abnormal, ghosts, magical creatures, sacred or uncanny objects, the unknown or the non-being, liminal spaces tend to give birth to violent / subtle / poetic / eerie enunciations, manifested as forms and images of phantasm, mirages of fractured memories, urban myths, conspiracy theories, or just an accidental non-event. These expressions are the symbolic and material tether between here and beyond, between the red pill and blue pill, between the imaginary and the real. What they might produce: an indeterminate, churning intensity; an automaton capable of subverting the politics of daily life, traversing the boundary of subjective thinking, and reconfiguring our cognition of the past and future; a “pineal eye” that sees and burns its way to the Outside.

“The eye […] is not a product of the understanding, but is instead an immediate existence; it opens and blinds itself like a conflagration, or like a fever that eats the being, or more exactly, the head.” (Georges Bataille)

Our aim is to expose and explore the mechanisms and potentials of liminal spaces. What is shown here is neither pathological symptoms nor psychopolitical projections, but a series of liminal portrayal of contemporary spatialities, cataloging different modes of resonance and interaction with such spaces, be it in the form of a festive ritual on the ruins of a settler village, the self-corrosion of layered fragments of urban memory, a postpolitical pastiche of left melancholia, a vision of ghosts haunting the faces of nameless protestors, or be it romantic explosion of fictitious images, mythic spaces on a turntable, psychic interplays between human and things… We have one foot stuck in the quicksand, simultaneously captured and seduced by it.

What does it mean to suddenly find ourselves in an inescapable liminal space under the ongoing pandemic conditions? Why does it matter for our crisis-ridden reality, for our indeterminate past and unforeseeable future? In this instance, are we merely spectators, or have we already become ourselves a spectre in the (hi)story?