MAKING HISTORY—By Andrew Maerkle
“I grew up with stories—not from a book, but from a storyteller, my late father. I remember vividly how Dad used to tell stories to all my friends in front of our house. My favorite was the legend about the dowry of the princess of the mountain Gunung Ledang. As a kid, my imagination went completely wild when I heard about the list of impossible conditions that the princess requested as her dowry to the Sultan of Malacca. Can you even imagine?”
READING A WAVE—By Andrew Maerkle
“The exhibition brings up stories of migration and diaspora to remind us that Busan was a city where immigrants from different regions all coexisted through the late 19th century, the Korean War, and industrialization; it is a call to defend and maintain that spirit of openness and inclusion.”
EVERYWHERE DIFFERENTLY (CONDENSED)—By Andrew Maerkle
“I think of androgyny more as a multiplying than a doubling per se. I never had a strong identification with the two genders I was offered when I was growing up. I see shades of gender, degrees toward the masculine and degrees toward the feminine and everything in between. And I was somewhere in between, feeling like I had the best of both sides without being either.”
NEVERENDING NEVERENDING STORIES—By Andrew Maerkle
“My idea was to produce a reportage painting that would chronicle Japan’s relationship with nuclear power. I think it’s the same for anybody, but something that starts out as a shocking event will fade from memory over the years. In order to resist that, I wanted to make a reportage painting ghastly enough to immediately recall the terror and foreboding of the time for viewers.”
“Without doubt, many art institutions will harbor the fantasy of catching up to the instant—for example, by making ‘instagrammable’ shows—but for me, a possible redemption of the museum today is its very slowness. It can offer a break in the ‘rhetoric of immediacy’ demanded by the accelerated circuit of social media.”
“That faction of the Kyoto School took significant risks with their careers and lives to do and say what they thought to be right. And we might also acknowledge that they sought to do this in a largely uncynical way, in the thickness of their historical moment, without the benefit of hindsight. Reading about them makes me wonder if I would have been able to do any better in a similar situation.”
LEAP BEYOND VOID—By Andrew Maerkle
“How does Buddhism get wrapped up in the techniques of violence and killing of samurai culture, which in many ways culminated in kamikaze culture? This led me to a kind of inconsistency at the root of Kyoto School philosophy. For example, Kitaro Nishida’s foundational concept of zettai mu, or “absolute nothingness”: it is absolute but nothing at the same time.”
“For me the volcano has always represented a central metaphor for the complex relationships between society and politics in Italy. At the foot of the sleeping monster the mafia runs its empire. Meanwhile, all official attention is focused on the volcano, where nature is dramatized as a media spectacle—a powerful structure beyond comprehension.”
“I try to create an anarchic organization of cinematic space in my films and larger exhibitions. Anarchic organization attempts to build a foundation for thinking and acting by destabilizing the old hierarchies of film’s components. It gives viewers more freedom about where to look, what to read first, how to bring all of these narratives together, and, indeed, how to edit the space.”
DOUBLE WHISTLER — By Andrew Maerkle
“In recent years I’ve been struck by the affinities between astronomy and cinema. On one level, both engage with concepts of light, time, and distance. Indeed, it could be argued that both astronomy and cinema are essentially composed of only these elements. On yet another level, both can be understood as sharing, in different ways, fundamental aspects of uncertainty and speculation.”