BLOG: Hauntological Trajectories in “When Does An Exhibition Begin and End?”
“The time is out of joint.”
Derrida opens Spectres of Marx (1993) with the above line, taken from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, wherein the troubled prince is communing with the ghost of his father. Derrida invokes the ghost of Hamlet’s father to bear the weight of history as it is deconstructed, to preface disjointedness and pluralism.
The seeping of hauntology is evident in the Curating Lab Public Symposium, “When Does An Exhibition Begin And End?” Co-organized by Singaporean artist/writer/curator Heman Chong and Barcelona-based curatorial office Latitudes as part of Curating Lab 2014, it featured Singapore’s National Art Gallery curator Shabbir Hussein Mustafa, artists Charles Lim and Shubigi Rao and Centre for Contemporary Art curators Anca Rujoiu and Vera Mey as interlocutors. Perhaps the Derridian line, waiting to be appropriated as a foil to the (rhetorical) question and (curatorial) framework “When Does An Exhibition Begin And End?,” is “a question of repetition: a spectre is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.”
