Studio for Immediate Spaces
Pam Virada+
Pam Virada is an artist interested in the notions between the cinematic and various temporalities as means to navigate ghostly forces and intimate stories. She utilises mixed-media installations and moving image to reconfigure pre-existing contexts and narratives; the impermanence particular subsequently appears in spatial arrangements, where whispers of intimate turmoils take the form of objects and text.
Feng Shui is a practice used to organise the human-built environment in ancient China. It is an ancestral knowledge which initially functioned as a mechanism for women and peasants to locate themselves within Confucianism's patriarchal system. This vision has been dislocated from its original context in western imaginaries.
In No Transcendence, Only Immanence, the deterioration of the courthouse is paired with the concept of hauntings in Feng Shui. The artist delves into these concepts by examining the presence of water leakages, excesses and imbalances of elements in the exhibition space. She adopts Feng Shui's spatial reconfiguration tools by 'shedding light' onto hand-spun bead curtain to counterbalance the surplus of water in the room. Through the voice of her female family members reading poems from 'The Book of Odes', a collection of poems focusing on Confucian ideology, the work highlights diasporic-Chinese women's awareness of perpetual hauntings in space as a hereditary coping mechanism for navigating the Confucian system. Expressed through various cyclical notions—looped celluloid film projection, disembodied readings and the spinning of beads—Virada emphasises the everlasting time experienced through these hauntings.