ADINANDRA BELUKAR

"The rainforests in Genevieve Chua's works are spaces marked by the uncanny. In her recent series of works--Raised as a Pack of Wolves andFull Moon and Foxes--, Chua has brought into the forests groups of adolescent girls, who are photographed wandering through the shrubbery like a pack of feral creatures. The artist's gaze is bent upon picking up hints of the sinister, lurid and abnormal – the dark beauty of certain botany, the vagaries of pubescent sexuality, the claustrophobia of the forest… –, identifying the forests as a space where marginal beings inhabit.

Chua's gesture is less a deliberate transgression of nature than a revelation that nature itself is paradoxically, the transgression. As it seems, the natural and the preternatural are coincident. The forest, instead of being transfigured by dangerous intruders, is actually the one engrafting into them their transgressions, in the same way the stage incarnates within an actor his role.

However, in Adinandra Belukar, the mise en scène has been emptied of its ensemble and is left to speak for itself. The overarching narrative thread that runs through many of Chua's prior works is also absent. Instead, we are confronted with a barren crepuscular landscape. But while the darkness obscures, it is not inscrutable, for within this blackness are suggestions of the insidious. In particular, the artist's graphite drawings on the walls shimmer unstably under the faint illumination, each containing a latent energy and pointing towards a world hitherto unbeknownst to us. The subtly revolving trees in the accompanying video installations add to this phantasmagoria. In this light, the work examines not the nature of darkness per se, but how it is continually transfigured by the roving eye of its perceiver. As the audience, we fill this void with our projections: it is from within that horror inhabits us.

The work dwells in the ambiguities of the nocturnal world and relishes the theatricality of the barely visible. Here is a theatre not of spectacle, but of hushed insinuations on what appears to be an empty stage."- Ho Rui An

 

 

 

 

 

The SB2011 installation consists of 2 videos and graphite drawings. Closest to the entrance is a video that runs on loop (duration: 15min). This video is computer generated from a single photograph of a tree that was shot with night vision. In the video, the tree revolves 180° and there is substantial interpolation and grain because the computer did not have sufficient information to generate a 360° model from one image.

There are two entrances that leads to a long narrow corridor in cul-de-sac fashion. All walls are a wash of matt-black, and on them are graphite drawings of "bursts". These shapes were generated from the crown of trees that were photographed in the dark, with night vision. At the dead-end of the corridor is the second video on a plasma screen (duration 2min 42 sec). It features flora that is luminous in the dark.

The graphite drawings on black walls receives 3 sources of light, sunlight from the door-less entrance; the overhead projection from the video; and the flicker emitted from the plasma screen. The middle portion of the corridor is pitch dark, but features some of these drawings if discovered by other means of illumination.