Aesthetics of Silence (2021)

Conceived by Celina Loh, co-curated by Celina Loh and Amanda Ariawan, produced by Wei-Ling Contemporary.

Aesthetics of Silence borrows its title from Susan Sontag’s first essay from her famous oeuvre, ‘Styles of Radical Will’ (1969), in which she examines how silence mediates the role of art as a form of spirituality, particularly in a globalised world.

The exhibition focuses on this concept of silence during the Covid-19 pandemic, a timely moment in which simultaneously worldwide, we are forced to live remotely. All of a sudden, we have been given the space to isolate, sit with ourselves, and unlearn things; a chance to look at what we crave ‘beyond knowledge’ and ‘beyond speech’, as Sontag terms it. While the exhibition takes Sontag’s essay as an entry point, it offers secondhand interpretations by the featured artists, through their own explorations on the metaphorical notion of silence. 

Exhibiting artists: Robert Schaberl, Ivan Lam, Melati Suryodarmo, Arin Rungjang, Roger Ballen, HH Lim, Heather Dewey-Hagborg and Rajinder Singh.