Sequestered Spaces – Fleeting Light
Artists Faris Nakamura & Bunga Yuridespita
Curator Beverley Harrison, Fascicle Contemporary
Private View & Performance by Bunga Yuridespita: Friday 2nd October, 6pm – 9pm
Exhibition Open: Thursday 1st – Sunday 4th October
Opening hours: Daily, 10am–5pm
Performance by Bunga Yuridespita: Saturday 3rd October, 1pm – 2pm
Artist Roundtable Discussion with Coffee & Pastries: Sunday 4th October, 11am – 1pm
Location: Gallery 1
We construct sequestered spaces, safe havens in which the Self can reside, whether in urban architectures, rural countrysides, or within our minds. These spaces and edifices become concrete reflections and extensions of the self, collective identity, and our socio-political cultural milieus. Architectural form renders tangible the intangible. What is spatially significant experientially?
In collaborative tandem, Faris Nakamura and Bunga Yuridespita’s illusory architectural paintings and intermedia artworks explore these spatial nuances, querying how social and personal spaces intertwine, function and are experienced. Their formal, abstract works open a dialogue on sequestered, liminal spaces of light, shadow and colour – the uncertain thresholds between secure and tenuous ways of being. Colourful sculptural paintings, performance and filmic media trouble Western one point perspective, creating multiple vantage points and sightlines. Reflections and spatial ambiguity unfold.
A Soft Space Opened Where None Was Promised is a new collaborative work by Faris Nakamura and Bunga Yuridespita. Nakamura’s freestanding skyscraper-like sculpture is restaged. Yuridespita’s filmic media Dance of Dimensions, 2024, streams into Nakamura’s two white wooden twin towers’ apartment-like interiors. The interior is visible through a horizontal strip of glass. The filmic projection simulates light and shadow throughout the sculpture’s interior spaces, fleetingly flashing, seemingly sweeping internal movement through hallways and generic living spaces. The light’s movement choreographs a haptic illusion of walking through the space.
This external filmic gaze superimposes imprints, not only on the sculpture’s architectures, but also the architectures of our minds. We imagine an internal reality within, in contrast to the minimalistic, sharply defined white lines of the two abutting skyscrapers. Through spatial interpretation, we try to piece together an undisclosed narrative, connoted by the atmosphere’s uncanny familiarity, yet strangeness. The sculpture’s austerity and ethereal isolation contrasts with Yuridespita’s everyday soundscape of doors opening, dogs barking and footsteps. The sculpture haunts in its disquieting homeliness and detached observational distancing. Nakamura views the Twin Towers as a protective refuge, for these sensory everyday sounds.
However, as we bend to peer inside and imagine personal and interpersonal social scenarios in unfolding rooms, we ask ourselves whether peeking through structural gaps and crevices signals psychologists Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud’s Scopophilia– a titillating glee in illicit looking – voyeurism. Alternatively, could our gaze be that of surveillance, like the Panopticon’s omnipresent gaze of power, control and censure, described by philosopher Michel Foucault, in relation to prisons and political regimes? And yet, looking closely is the point, for it garners visitors’ attentiveness to societal spatial nuances, and the intersplicing of personal, collective and socio-political structures.
In Nakamura’s geometric, monographic wall sculptures, minimalistic façades hide configured internal architectural spaces. Their abstracted organic shapes are potentially human and/or non-human. We look closely at the spaces behind, to analyse these hidden spaces’ characteristics. Are they spaces of refuge or avenues of escape, conveyed by light, shadow, and deeply saturated colour – metaphorically and figuratively? The spotlit sculptures caste a rhythmic constellation of light and shadow, along two gallery walls. These sculptures acquire a reflective interplay with Yuridespita’s mirror mural on the opposite wall, onto which is projected Yuridespita’s filmic projection of an architectural drawing.
Faris’ sculptures form a microcosm, a series of architectures, within the macrocosm of the gallery’s architectural space. In two corners of the gallery, Yuridespita’s two abstract paintings of illusionary architecture, are accompanied by mirrors that reflect the artworks within the gallery. Thus, the gallery’s architecture becomes part of the artworks. Likewise, Yuridespita performs in a body sculpture that echoes architectural forms. Her colourful cubist-like sculpture contains frames with mirrors that reflect the space, everchanging as she moves. The frames connote console screens, as well as the lens by which we perceive what is around us.
Two live performances will occur within the gallery, signifying the audience, artworks and gallery’s interconnectedness with the artist’s body and her performance. The accompanying performance video ‘I did,’ features a self-referential soundscape and is shot with Yuridespita playfully wandering through countrysides and urban spaces. Her body sculpture’s mirrors reflect not only the environment, but also the milieu’s social fabric of estrangement, association and/or interconnectedness.
Combined, Yuridespita and Nakamura’s works discourse how architecture reflects literally and metaphorically socio-political spatial allocations and cultural attitudes, as well as how individuals are continually impacted, defined, yet find refuge, within these spaces. Where and how do we find ways of inhabiting spaces, to protect and harbour the Self?
The nuances within architecture and space are explored, as we observe these artworks’ configurations, acknowledging our own stories and shifting perceptions, as we experience these works physicality and flowing passageways. We probe societal spaces’ nature, while imagining potential socio-cultural and intercultural narratives. Is the space inclusionary, exclusionary, a place of refuge, isolation, acceptance or scrutiny?
Curator, Beverley Harrison, Fascicle Contemporary
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