On Things and Beings:

BS: Just adding this while we are already writing other sections of this curatorial talk. Shouldn’t we explain a little more explicitly why we positioned guna-guna and “diasporic magic” as central notions in the open call, before we discuss the exhibition?

AP: No? Is anyone interested?

BS: I don’t know, let’s see what the editors say when they read our first draft.

EDITOR: I think it’s good to explain.

BS: OK, it started with us using the idea of guna-guna to secretly empower ourselves. This was always in situations where we could use a bit of magic. Mentioning the term was kind of a secret language in which we could express our support for each other.

AP: We both grew up with the notion of guna-guna, although in quite different ways. Part of my family, on Bali, uses it in daily life, and my father has many childhood stories about how guna-guna was used to protect him from natural and supernatural forces. But in your family, who descend from other Indonesian islands, Celebes and Java, they shy away from it a bit more, don’t they? They’re probably thinking, “It is not something you should talk about, let alone make an exhibition about!”

BS: Indeed, in my family it’s something we’re not supposed to talk about. But that’s exactly what fascinates me: it’s a taboo, and therefore something of a hidden knowledge—an “if you know, you know” kind of thing. In Dutch books published around the turn of the century (Daum 1889, Couperus 1900) guna-guna is considered as a silent force. However, in more recent literature (Zoest, Van, and Nunuk Tri Heryati 1992) it is explained as a broad realm of spirits and spiritual practices. Overall, it’s a subject on which relatively little has been written or publicly discussed. What I also noticed is that the meaning of guna-guna has changed over time and differs between generations and locations.

AP: I agree. And it is diasporic in the sense that at different sites it’s seen as positive, negative, or something in between, and the notion moves with people across continents and alludes to their sense of belonging.

BS: [nods in agreement.]

AP: Okay… let’s talk about our exhibition then. It deals with forces that not everyone can see, but most people certainly feel. Through this exhibition we want to move away from explaining guna-guna solely as a location-specific and spiritual phenomenon. This exhibition investigates the term as a metaphor for the enigmatic or metaphysical powers of objects and sculptures, whether inside or outside the museum realm; for everything that eludes direct observation in design and art. When Things Are Beings moves between the elusive pull of both abstract concepts and forms of spirituality that can lie hidden in objects and sculptures.

BS: The 24 projects in the exhibition range from installations to photography and print, jewelry, object design, video, film, soundscape, and performance. They were selected from more than 750 applications—together with a jury we focused on the inner power of objects and sculptures to make our decision. Some projects in the exhibition appeal to a spiritual world, and others connect complex and layered (hi)stories between people from different generations and locations. Some of the projects have a strong enigmatic force—they cause confusion, but evoke curiosity at the same time. Some even appear to have metaphysical strength, existing both here and beyond our physical world and sensory perception. What we’re trying to say with this is that design and art can enchant or captivate you in a way that’s not always clearly explicable or easily defined.

AP: Yes.

BS: Lol. Yes. Okay. When Things Are Beings, the title of the exhibition, refers to what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls “the strong relationship between human actions and things” (1986). We chose this title because we noticed during the studio visits that all the selected projects bridge the worlds of the material and the non-material: they connect ideas and objects, spirituality and materiality, or social issues with tangible matter.

AP: Exactly. In the museum people tend to attach values to things, like beautiful, ugly, expensive, cheap, interesting, boring, etc. Looking at things through Appadurai’s lens actually offers the opportunity to see things as always in motion. He shines light on human behavior and positions their actions in relation to an object in a social context. Our exhibition addresses the inner power of objects and sculptures in several ways: As well as the material elements and techniques or stylistic characteristics, it highlights the intention of things and how people can become emotionally and sensually entangled with them.

BS: The material and the immaterial, the spiritual and the non-spiritual, the animate and the inanimate all exist together in this exhibition. Maybe we should briefly address the fact that we don’t believe in such divisions either; that we believe things are also beings – wink wink.

AP: 😜
Yes, Appadurai says that people and things are not radically distinct categories, and that the transactions that surround things are invested with the properties of social relations. In the Global North, the common view is that industrial production and circulation in global networks has led to “things” losing their mystique. This loss is seen as a precondition for modernity—both a historical period and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes, and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissance of 17th-century thought and the 18th-century “Enlightenment”. However, in recent years it looks as if the animate and the inanimate worlds are becoming increasingly intertwined. A new sensibility is emerging in everyday life for the strange existence of things, for their unattainable alterity and hidden power. Accordingly, the Western dichotomy between humanity and non-humanity is continuing to weaken. (Saurma-Jeltsch & Eisenbeiß 2010).

BS: This ties in with the way we aim to present the projects in this exhibition. It’s an interdisciplinary group show where contemporary design and art coalesce. We are trying to evoke the idea of the seen and unseen as well as break with the traditional rationale of the white cube through the design by architecture studio Studio LA, using colorful mesh walls.

AP: Another important thing is that we wanted to move away from seeing guna-guna only as a concept tied to one specific geographic site or diasporic culture, or explaining it in a one-sided way. The variety of projects in the exhibition taught us to explore the concept more as a metaphor for “spiritual thinking through things.”

BS: Addressing the spiritual realm through art is not something new. In Euro-American art circles, the best-known movements that have been tied to mysticism are the Symbolists, Expressionists, and famous artists such as Piet Mondriaan (Bauduin 2013). Mondriaan was a member of the Dutch Theosophical Society from 1909 and he kept a picture in his studio of Madame Blavatsky, one of its co-founders. The Russian aristocrat Madame Blavatsky and other theosophical writers believed that contact with a deeper spiritual reality could be established through intuition, meditation, revelation, or some other state transcending normal human consciousness.

But what’s more interesting in the light of current social debates, is the steady increase of interest in spiritual powers within contemporary art practices. Critical thinkers have shed light on how the occult offers critical conditions of thinking. They propose that ‘the magical’—or spiritual, religious, esoteric—is a fundamental threat to the logic of colonialism, capitalism, ecocides, and gender constructs (Silvia Federici, Dale Turner, Lee Harrington and Tai Fenix Kulystin, among others). This way of thinking has gained traction in the contemporary art world and continues to inspire cultural practitioners who are interested in societal questions (Sejbæk Torp-Pedersen et. al., 2021).

EDITOR: This is quite a big statement. I think readers on both sides of the political spectrum might like to read a few words on how the magical undermines all these pervasive constructs. Don’t answer with “it’s magic!” please.

AP: Hahaha okay, that’s fair. Mira Asriningtyas’ essay in this publication explains using several examples how the magical resists such constructs. She writes how people can enchant the world, and by doing so reject the heterogeneous structural processes that shaped the modern world and, if this is done collectively and intentionally, turn a specific agenda into a common goal.

Back to the works in the exhibition…. With the stylistic characteristics and sociological constructs in mind, we grouped the projects in different conceptual clusters according to overarching visual elements and the social questions they raise, in which style and subject matter can coexist. Iris Kensmil and Sebastian Koudijzer both busy themselves with (Ancestral) Family Matters. Ana Navas, Eric Giraudet de Boudemange and Laurids Gallée illuminate transformational processes in their Shape Shifter projects. Sondi, Ginevra Petrozzi, Amy Suo Wu & Elaine W. Ho work within the Digital Realm, where they create safe havens. And Yinka Buutfeld, Wendy Owusu, Wei Yang and Aram Lee make objects that allude to Embodied Empowerment. Others, like Seán Hannan, Chequita Nahar, Shani Leseman and Antonio Jose Guzman & Iva Jankovic, work around Rites and Rituals—which also ties in with the projects by Ayo, Saskia Noor van Imhoff, Jae Pil Eun that refer to Cultured Nature. The inner power of objects also comes to the surface in the projects by Hatutamelen (James Noya), Magali Reus and Sabine Marcelis. They create Objects of Desire, work that evokes curiosity while allowing meaning to remain elusive and challenging to grasp. And a more critical note comes from Marcos Kueh and James Beckett, whose works evoke Skeptical Spectres.

BS: I think we should make it clear that these conceptual clusters are neither indicated in the exhibition nor further substantiated as themes. We developed them after arriving at our selection with the jury. Devising these clusters helped us find connections between the projects and distill the subjects that the designers and artists brought to us in reaction to the open call.

AP: The way a curator wants to bring structure to the world?

BS: Yes—in hindsight, as a process of reverse engineering. 😆

AP: 🤣 I can’t deal with that term.

BS: Lol—sorry I can’t help it, my study group (Curatorial Research Collective, TU/e) keeps using this phrase. It might seem a bit silly and technical, but it does apply in a way to the Municipal Art Acquisitions projects, right? 🙃

It’s also the least of our problems. A bigger question is that we are asking ourselves how a museum should deal with objects that contain hidden knowledge, taboos, spiritual power, the metaphysical and the enigmatic, i.e. forces that not everyone can see but many can certainly feel. There are two issues at stake. Firstly, the acquisition process risks turning the intrinsic value of these works into commodities—a property or product. As Appadurai says, the world of art is tied to the related worlds of collection and commodification (2006). Secondly, the museum is, in general, mostly geared towards conserving and presenting visible, concrete works—even conceptual artworks such as Sol LeWitt’s murals have installation instructions that direct towards a visual outcome. Same goes for performances and their choreographies.

AP: This is exactly what I’m interested in—in an object’s biography and how this changes when an object enters the museum space and maybe the collection. An object may be tamed by becoming part of this environment, maybe resulting in the loss of its original purpose, but never of its power, I think. A transformational appropriation of things in this way, marked by constant revaluation, reframing and recoding, illuminates transformational processes in social contextualization, knowledge transfer and—because individuals are always involved in the making of exhibitions and collections—the transformation of individual identities (Saurma-Jeltsch & Eisenbeiß 2010).

EDITOR: Wait a minute, instead of wondering how a museum should deal with objects that contain more than their materiality might suggest, how are you as museum curators working with such hidden forces now, while preparing for the exhibition? Is it possible for curators to protect these works from a potential loss of meaning in the physical and symbolic transfer to the museum context? Possibly using your own guna-guna?

AP: Yeah, so how do we personally take care of these projects? Britte and I already attach a lot of importance to working very closely with designers and artists and find that intimate relationship crucial for what we do. From what we’ve learned curating this exhibition, we would continue to approach objects and sculptures in the same way and really cherish the relationship that we curators, along with everyone else in the museum—including the audience—have with them. We’re trying to do this by giving space to their stories in the exhibitions and wall texts and putting them in a certain context where they can encounter each other. But we still don’t have a clear answer as to how we can put this in practice on a long-term basis. How will the next generation of curators take care of them?

BS: Individual curatorial intentions aside, we believe one should stay critical of the museum’s design framework and art historical framework, of how they influence a specific construction of meaning and knowledge about design and art—especially when it comes to objects that contain a power that many people can feel, even if they can’t see it. Sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos acknowledges the impossibility of communicating the unsayable: All that arbitrarily was conceived as being “outside” a highly intellectualized and rationalized field was ignored or stigmatized. The unsayable is described here as the (dark) world of passions, intuitions, feelings, emotions, affections, beliefs, faiths, values, and myths that cannot be communicated save directly (2016:5).

AP: That’s right. How can we give space to the unsayable and intangible as well as the perhaps more easily articulated visual aspects of design and art? Over the last decade, much has been written about how one of the functions of objects in museums can be to help us remember histories and tell stories, or enable us to make connections between different realms in space and time (Dudley 2010; 2012; 2017, Basu 2013). As the interdisciplinary scholar James Clifford says: “Sites of collections start to appear like places of encounter and openings: objects are travelers, crossers, diasporic with powerful, very meaningful ties elsewhere” (Clifford, 1997).

BS: Ooh, I love that as a way to conclude our conversation. It’s an appeal for continuing discussions and further reading, and conversations that hopefully resonate long after this project.

AP: 💜💜💜