Subterranean Organ

Subterranean Organ is a durational, experimental programme and time-based exercise curated by Daisy Wang and Celeste Viv Ly. The exhibition programme inquires into the interiority and exteriority of the more-than-human body in relation to fluidity, contingency, and the architectural and performative spaces within and without. 

Taking the manifold structure of an organ and biological osmosis as a method for charting the space, the programme reflects on how a body/space could be potentialised as a totality and the constituents of the totality in its fluidity and multifarious exchange. As the biological organ takes on abstract forms that are self-contained and yet infinitely interlinked within the bodily system and the ambient system outside the body, this programme maps the inner connection between the human and the more-than-human. It uses the body as a framework for bio-cosmic nourishment, building a ‘cosmology’ of life, where the form is fluidly mutable, dissolving and shaping itself anew. It is able to create a diverse instinct environment that expands our understanding of the body and its possibilities of inviting and engaging with alternate systems.

The artists in the show work across a range of mediums including sound, image, text, spatial works and live art, exploring how a work could be living, fluid, in becoming as singular entities and part of a larger collective entity through mobilising the in-between spaces, the process of interchange and transgression of boundaries. In blurring the lines between the inside and outside, self and other, and the human and more-than-human, the still and time-based works turn the exhibiting architectural space into a living, fluid, and disobedient collective body. Through this approach, we also aim to provide certain capacities of a nexus – to traverse, adapt, transcribe, and connect the subjectivities among its inhabitants, and most importantly, a continual process of feeling and thinking through the self and other in an intersubjective web of becoming.

The exhibition showcases the works of 19 emerging and established artists from around the world, including Buket Yenidoğan, Celeste Viv Ly, Chang Gao, Cherry Song, Di Chen, Eleanor Turnbull, Eleni Zervou, Emma Papworth, Evangelia Dimitrakopoulou, Freya Fang Wang, Friendred Peng, Kate Howe, Li Yilei, Lulu Wang, Maya Masuda, Noëlle Turner, Pierre Engelhard, Sasha Ercole, Shadow (Collective Led by Xiaoying Lin).