Force Majeure

Force Majeure

SOKONG!, RAWS SYNDICATE, and Lightbox Photo Library have long been promoting the circulation of photobooks; a vessel of artists’ ideas and feelings and a medium that facilitates the circulation and the exchange of minds. The collaboration between the three organizations aims to reflect on what contemporary circulation is, its fundamental condition and explore the dialectical relations between circulation and accidents. 

Circulation was used to symbolize the advancement of modernity, while on the other hand, there’s the pandemic which hindered global circulation. Pandemic is seen as part of a force majeure, an act of God. One of the many things beyond our control, like accidents and any other natural catastrophes. However, this project attempts to inspect at accidents more widely and dialectically by looking at it not only as something tragic but also projecting the future. 

The main theme of the exhibition will be “the journey of image circulation.” The exhibition will be divided into three parts, which will be marked by different lighting presentation. A journey from a lightroom to the darkroom. The lightroom presents “the beautiful and political propaganda landscape,” and the darkroom will consist of images of “traffic accidents” in the media and “dark tourism.” The spatial arrangement of the above three sections will form a “cycle.” In addition, one photograph that occurs repeatedly in the three sections of the exhibition space and is reassigned in different contexts, will serve as a major clue. 

Our strategy of image deployment is to collect ready-made images from the Internet or printed media, revisit the disaster site for location shooting, and use post-production techniques to intervene and alter main subjects of the images.