Some more install shots by @agnesesanvito for #motionsofthiskind at the #bruneigallery @soasuni. Open until June 22!!! #CianDayrit Northern Conquests in Oriental Soil and Sea 2019 Tapestry, archival objects and documents arranged in museum vitrines 215 cm x 238 cm Dimensions variable Commissioned with the support of @gasworkslondon Dayrit’s map, entitled Northern Conquests in Oriental Soil and Sea, aims to literally upturn our traditional perception of geographic space. Based upon a work from 1744 by Emanuel Bowen (a renowned English map maker who worked for both George II of England and Louis XV of France), Dayrit’s Northern Conquests... not only physically reverses the original through rotating the North and South axes but replaces the colonial names delineated in Bowen’s “new and accurate map of the East India Islands” with the collective names of local indigenous groups. As such, whilst geographically depicting the exact area described by Isaac Newton in a passage from Principia— the seas between “Leuconia”, South China, and Borneo, the very site in which Edward Halley’s strange tidal motions were discovered —Dayrit rejects the naturalised efficiency of colonial cartography and instead reveals a defiant minor narrative working against the historical grain. Yet the power of Dayrit’s “counter cartography” not only emerges in its dense infographic status—the ability to function as visual forms depicting space, memory, and time, alongside the plethora of emblems and clandestine insignia embedded within them— but so too through their basically anachronistic positionality. The contrast of materials, concepts, and temporalities, as well as the chronological juxtaposition of pre- and neo-colonial artefacts, thus enables Dayrit to “talk about the issues of today with the language of yesterday”. While the main body of the tapestry was produced in Metro Manila, final key elements were completed at Hand & Lock, a London-based establishment founded in 1767 and official embroiderers to the Royal Family and Royal Armed Forces. Imperial and colonial history thus not only exist representatationally or conceptually but are woven into the very fabric of the tapestry (at Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies) https://www.instagram.com/p/BwblvdjFHkO/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=ek2xfto3cwr3
