Rosa’s Wound

Rosa's Wound adopts the imagery in Goagula, and transforms the "wound" into a Split that connects "time - space" as well as "individual - collective," allowing audience to glimpse into how violence and trauma have transfigured and persisted in our society. The "wound" reveals how human vulnerability has reflected our co-existence and need for one another, invoking our social responsibility to shoulder one another's pain. It invites us to contemplate on the idea of how "I" could become "we" in a changing "time - space" and between the differentiated "individual - collective." The exhibition pays attention to survivors of colonization, the Cold War, authoritarian regimes, and neoliberalism and their offspring, and revisits the invisible and indescribable history and memory from a different perspective, exploring how affective aesthetics triggers our reflection about our co-existence. It allows us to respond to other's traumas and cope with increasing violence today without letting indifference and prejudice reinforce the structure of violence and trauma.
Nevertheless, as Susan Sontag has reminded us, "we" is a pronoun that requires to be constantly examined. Under different conditions and circumstances, "we" is often evoked as an imaginary collective to serve dissimilar ideologies. It is similar that, with different stances and arguments, the term "human rights," which denotes absolute justice, might give strength to strong prejudice and make it even more unbreakable in certain circumstances. How we could sidestep the trap of unmindful sympathy and identification is another aspect that this exhibition intends to explore when thinking about memory and the politics of emotion.
In the name of art, Rosa's Wound expects to discuss the complex Asian historical context and status quo, echolocating its evasive boundary and discovering a path with imagination. It is a way that enables us to transit from an individualistic body to a social and historic one, which carries our shared sorrow and suffering in history. It uses memory as the politics of resistance and transcends the contingency of incidents, deconstructing traumas and sublimating them through aesthetics.