munus I – Himali Singh Soin: Static Range

“At the end, instead of the disease metastasizing, it is the love that proliferates.”

—Himali Singh Soin

Throughout 2024, the world remained shrouded in division and conflict, war, protectionism, extreme climate events, and disease. Drawing on the ancient wisdom anchored in the term “munus” (which carries connotations of both obligation and gift), citing bar continued and deepened various concepts and practices centered around care and decolonisation that began in 2023. Through reading groups and various collective gatherings, we attempt to explore: “In this wounded world, what kind of contemporary healing wisdom can we co-create by being together?” (munus is the root of “community”)

策展計畫munus 奠基於這些讀書社群收穫的啟發與所面臨的難題，近一步聚焦免疫的角度（munus亦為immunity的字根），踏入模糊與不舒適地帶，包括生命背負的共業、集體的「文化疾病」（cultural dis-ease），以及《善終現代性 》*所指向的，語言無法穿透的灰階、矛盾與半透明的現實，如何造就了團結與療癒的 (不)可能。

munus展覽的上半場奠基於藝術家希瑪利．辛格．索恩 （Himali Singh Soin）的「半透明」（On Translucency) 宣言概念，藝術家在近年的創作從冰、石油、鹽等物質媒介揭示被遺忘之故事與推測另類的未來，在清澈透明與絕對色彩之間，朝向非人類的智慧— 接受無法全知，允許情感的擾動，有條件的坦露/隱藏/吸收資訊，既獨立又相連。在其宣言中，藝術家認為「半透明是以另一種光，觀看這個不定的、多孔滲漏的，在每個事物之間以薄膜相接的世界。」

The main body of the exhibition is the Static Range series, which spans from the Himalayas during the Cold War era, to the UK’s Sellafield nuclear industrial park, to the Marshall Islands as the site of US Pacific nuclear testing. Within the many hued, glistening, fluorescent, burnt nuclear flows, it imagines intercepted or lost messages. The work traverses from the perspectives of mountains, atoms, birds, medicinal herbs, and deities, overlapping multiple temporal universes of deep time, histories of human love and suffering, and sudden and unknown ecological disasters. It opens up the singular narratives that restrict us within various modern dependencies on nation, security, stability, and engages in intimate dialogue with the resulting violence of pollution and censorship. The symbols that permeate and conduct in between are both warning messages and healing prescriptions, just as the mountain tells the atom in ‘Affirmation’, ‘ “this letter holds many elsewhere together.”

However, this is not merely a romantic ballad praising healing and cross-species solidarity. Rather, it is the perception of an extremely complex reality through the lens of a murky apocalyptic spectacle—”interconnection” is never only beautiful; what’s entangled together are also scars and toxicities. What we believe we are pursuing and resisting at opposite ends of a linear spectrum are actually mixed into every living moment, even depending on each other—cures are contained in toxicity, divinity in degradation, and failure and endings also conceal love and blessings.

*Vanessa Machado de Oliveira 所著的《善終現代性》一書為策展計畫的重要啟發之一，全名：Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism （2021)