HEMAN CHONG – FOREIGN AFFAIRS
2019-03-18Foreign AfFairs is a series of apparently banal photographs of embassy back doors. The systematic repetition of images simultaneously recalls a cinematic frame and the omnipresence of the surveillance camera that watches nothing and everything. As a literal and cumulative representation of embassy backdoors, each image of a backdoor can be read as infrastructural, making apparent the very form of the non-descript embassy backdoor and its component parts: greenery as camouflage, the solitary aspect of a strategically positioned surveillance camera, the additional lock or additional gates. These mundane representations are the threshold of the exceptional space of the embassy, which in and of itself is the physical manifestation of an agreement between two states of respective sovereignty.
Foreign Affairs speaks to the sites of infrastructural power in society today. The series implicitly points to society’s real fears of ‘back door’ agreements, actors invisibly and insidiously pulling the strings behind the veil of the everyday. As representations of information, the images reflect both the back stage upon which fears of international conflict, calamity and national disaster play out and/or are produced.
Opposite – Foreign Affairs #127, 2018
Exhibition runs through to April 6th, 2019
Amanda Wilkinson
1st Floor, 18 Brewer Street
W1F 0SH
London
