Nullify

2023



Classroom Willem de Rooij

1     Arhun Aksakal
      Red Dome, 2023 
      120x90cm

2    Divijah RajendraI
      crack for every body, 2023
      10x20 cm

3    Ming Yuan
      Subversion Zone, 2023
      8 channel sound installation, 26min https://yuanming.bandcamp.com/album/subduction-zone










































︎︎︎previous work

A Text by Ming Yuan

An eight-channel sound piece is installed behind the curtain of the space. I experiment with different ways of distorting field recordings that I made during my quarantine in China. I recorded verbal vocals of myself as recurrent samples in the work, featuring the most often used english words in news industry. The samples are played by machine-determined speakers to cover the room with voices that are constantly changing its direction of source. It creates a fiction where the voices were communicating with each other in an uncanny situation. It creates disorientation, and a situation of lost in the intangible discourse of social and historical contemplations.

‘The lights and the atmosphere are focusing and calming, but also challenging sensory perception. Do you remember how it felt listening to this voices, singings and chants? For me when you talked about it, I visualised something like a chorus, like chants or prayers in a way. The object referring much to smth. auratic producing a monumental gesture by a minimal one. Relating the object to your body, the materiality to our understanding of power and dissent. Sounds religious but I think it could be really strong to mimic smth in between anarchic, restoring collective power and freeing the inner voice, self etc..’(Arhun)

This sound piece responds to a non-violent demonstration that happened on the day of mid-moon festival 2022 in China. This is a national holiday where families unite and enjoy food together. At that time, the city of Chengdu was experiencing its eighth days of coercive lock down. As a way of releasing accumulated intense negative feelings caused by latent (and applied) violence, the whole city yelled through apartment windows on this night for hours. Quite surprising is, that the yelling were not angry or sad. On the contrary, people were yelling cheerfully and even singing to communicate. The shadow of violation in this case were transformed into something light and positive. This twist of attitude is what my work had been dealing with for a while now. I am interested in alternative strategies that respond to violence with non-violence and break the cycle of mirroring retaliation.

A Text by Arhun Aksakal

Nullifier, Nullification, z. dt. Tilgen, Nullifizieren, Annullieren, nichtig machen.

Latin nullificare = to esteem low, to: nullus = low, miserable and facere = to make

to eliminate completely as defective, no longer valid, as undesirable; to erase, to eradicate.

to render or declare legally void or inoperative: to nullify a contract.

to deprive (something) of value or effectiveness; make futile or of no consequence.

The architectural and aesthetic design of representative spaces, such as those of palaces, gardens and squares functioned as places where old and new orders of power were negotiated and realised. They were visible but mostly inaccessible to the public. The invisible interior of these architectures contains oversized spaces and an interior designed for its volume. What still connects the interior and exterior are the windows that allow a connection and an awareness of location. Curtains have been used to conceal and veil, altering the light, obscuring and revealing the space.

The word nullifier or nullifying often occurs in the context of politics and legal philosophy, where it is used to eliminate and nullify laws, legal situations, etc. The meaning of the word can thus have a positive or negative meaning; it rarely has a neutral or non-extreme connotation in the context in which it is used. Nullify can also be understood as redemption, which in finance refers to the scheduled or unscheduled repayment of debt. It can also be understood as restitution or repayment, the return of looted, unlawfully expropriated, extorted or forcibly sold the cultural property to the legitimate previous owners or their legal successors.

Reverse time, forget the space. Returning to the original state, resetting to factory settings. Heterotopia is a term used briefly by Michel Foucault in an early phase of his philosophy for spaces or places and their order-systematic meaning that have only partially or not fully implemented the norms given at a time or that function according to their own rules. Foucault assumes that there are spaces that reflect social relations in a particular way by representing, negating or reversing them. Heterotopias are institutionally often closed and often spatially delimited places in a society that are a scaled-down image or counter-image of society as a whole.