Violent Attachments

Sullivan+Strumpf Singapore presents Violent Attachments, a group exhibition curated by Singapore curator Tan Siuli, featuring works by FX Harsono, Lindy Lee, Eko Nugroho, Jakkai Siributr, and Adeela Suleman.

Violent Attachments explores the deeply embedded nature of violence, and mankind’s conscious as well as subconscious attachment to violence in its myriad forms. The term has currency in both psychoanalytic and political theory: studies have examined why so much of human violence occurs between people involved in an attachment paradigm, and the term has also been applied to an analysis of subject positions that are contingent on the exercising of violence on others, and how entire communities and political identities are sustained through these violent arrangements.

These texts point to a painful recognition that violence — although widely deplored as abhorrent — may in fact be deeply ingrained in the human psyche, infiltrating our most intimate relationships as well as broader political and social relations. It shapes a sense of self or subjectivity, and the very notion of ‘attachments’ implies the inextricable psychological, social as well as structural investment in forms of violence.

Collectively, the artworks in this exhibition explore various notions of and around violence, in particular how mankind’s various attachments are ultimately violent, and how painful histories may be (re)negotiated, especially those in which violence has become a conditioned part of one’s identity. Just as violence manifests itself in myriad ways, so too have artists adopted various artistic and aesthetic strategies to represent and comment on its forms – from the explicit to the insidious — from differing perspectives and subject positions.