Darkness, as a metaphor, can contain everything and nothing. It signifies a round nought of zero as well as the ovum awaiting impregnation: the very fabric of life. Joy and terror, tears of laughter and tears of pain.

 

The Dark Show brings together a tour de force by 8 local and international artists working primarily in two dimensional medium, though the liminal nature and the ambiguity of their artistic pursuits often manifest beyond their own individual or collective thresholds, creating an alternative portal / dimension somewhere in between - where sense, meaning, value is no longer given in a traditional perspective. The presence of absence, under and against the superordinate sign of exchange value, where images and stories have to be reinvented on a new terrain: reterritorialised, redimensionalised.

 

The liminality of darkness in this sense, is far from what is normally conceived almost exclusively in terms of constriction, stasis, and prohibition. The vastitude of enablements and probabilities which are opened up by this marking out of a frontier, in Heideggarian hermeneutic phenomenology, is but a beginning, a condition of becoming. Here, the absence of the ‘real’ is reduced to an opinion, and such opinion has now vanished, in the dark. That the singular form of reality has disappeared with it, and realities are serial-produced in the Dark Show, where the individual artist claims his / her own reality and / or state of consciousness, re-presenting their visions transcendentally. Together, these artists violate the logic of everyday spatiotemporal order, transgressing orientation and fiction, under the cloak of darkness.    

 

The Dark show marks an other line of intensity, other points of orientation, a dispersion of concepts and figures of subjectivation, to bring us the actualisation of the elusive, hitherto previously overlooked liminal practice: an uncanny experience of the stranger, other self.