THE ENIGMA OF ARRIVAL
19-23 June 2024
Royal College of Art, Battersea Campus
Studio Building, Howie Street
SW11 4AY
LONDON, UK
Video by vinx_imagehead
"Diasporas are always categorised by various forms of absence.”
- John Akomfrah
The Enigma of Arrival is a curatorial project by seven Royal College of Art students from the MA Curating Contemporary Art programme: Ahwa Habeeb, Clara Lai, David Tomlinson, Hannah Dowling, Qinle Jin, Sylvia Tan, and Yu Ying Chan. Together in partnership with the Triangle Network, this project consists of three artist commissions and a workshop. Borrowing its title from V.S. Naipaul’s novel, it delves into the intersections of time, identity, and diaspora, reflecting the enigmatic nature of settling into a new time or place. Challenging linear time, this project explores the fragmented nature of diasporic experience, where memory, nostalgia, and rebirth intertwine in a haze of past and present.
Featuring commissioned works by Joshua Woolford, Rieko Whitfield, and Duong Thuy Nguyen, a synergistic blend of audio-visual, sculptural, and collaborative media is presented. Woolford’s peacefully if we can, forcibly if we must narrates a personal perspective within an unfamiliar landscape. Questions of the untold are manifested through a communication between Woolford’s dual-screen display and Whitfield’s Diasporing Terrains – an audio-visual installation resulting from an intimate workshop, redefining the concept of diaspora. Meditating on ideas of memory, belonging, and adaptation, this is framed by Nguyen’s We, Now, Here, There, Together, a sculptural display exploring diasporic communities and their ancestral ties. We invite visitors to engage with the dynamic and multifaceted nature of diasporic existence.
Mark your arrival, feel the absence.
Photography by vinx_imagehead
peacefully if i can, forcefully if i must
JOSHUA WOOLFORD
2 Channel 4K digital video with digital sound
Exploring the rich history and experiences of members of the Caribbean diaspora here in the UK, Woolford has positioned themselves in dialogue with the countryside and rural environment in stark contrast to the English tradition of landscape paintings. Rather than showcasing serene stretches of land, Woolford’s piece consists of sharp movement and raw emotion screened alongside disorienting, harshly shifting environments which are in constant motion.
Filmed in and around one of the few surviving Chartist cottages in the Midlands whose political slogan ‘Peacefully if we can, forcefully if we must’ inspired the title of the piece, Woolford is both reflecting on their personal experience of being alone in a new landscape, as well as exploring the historical potency of an early 19th Century political movement whose protests, petitions and direct action paved the way for the working class (non land-owning) population of the UK to be afforded a voice within the political system.
Woolford’s piece continues a legacy of Black British artists such as Ingrid Pollard and Harold Offeh who position the Black body within the British landscape as a form of resistance, as well as referencing the role of Jamaican Chartist Leader William Cuffay in the advancement of the movement in 1840’s England.
Photography by vinx_imagehead
DIASPORING TERRAINS
RIEKO WHITFIELD
Digital video with digital sound, Fruits
Rieko Whitfield’s meditation and writing workshop “Diasporing Terrains” guides participants to improvise performances for a film that will be exhibited in The Enigma of Arrival at the Royal College of Art. The basis of the film will revolve around an altar of fruits and flowers offered in the workshop – primarily as metaphors for tenderness, hope, and resilience in the alchemising of grief – to co-create alternate landscapes beyond the gates of the coloniser’s garden.
Photography by vinx_imagehead
WE, NOW, THERE, TOGETHER
DUONG THUY NGUYEN
Bio resin, iron, acrylic
Inspired by traditional Oản cakes, a bell-shaped cake made of rice flour used as offerings to ancestors during holidays in Vietnam, my installation meditates on diasporic identity and relationships, weaving a narrative that transcends temporal boundaries, blending the past with the present and belonging with displacement and memory. The Oản cake is pristine and white, made with flour and sugar, symbolising purity and embodying heaven and earth. By juxtaposing the ephemeral nature of diasporic existence with the enduring legacy of ancestral traditions, I intend to craft a nuanced interplay between the visible and the invisible to explore the transient nature of migration and the eternal resonance of cultural heritage.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
"Triangle Network is a global network of artists and visual arts organisations that support professional development and cultural exchange amongst artists, curators and other arts professionals throughout the world. Since 1982, Triangle has provided opportunities for over 4,500 artists to connect with each other, make new work and build their practice through workshops, residencies, events, exhibitions, work placements and studio provision. This has led to the creation, association and partnership of 90 Triangle Network projects and organisations in 41 countries – an extensive, artist-focused and informal infrastructure that continues to evolve and expand and enable knowledge-sharing amongst partners from a world-wide pool of like-minded peers. Gasworks, a gallery and artist studio complex in London, is the main hub for Triangle’s activities."
ARTISTS
DUONG THUY NGUYEN
JOSHUA WOOLFORD
RIEKO WHITFIELD
CURATORS
AHWA HABEEB
DAVID TOMLINSON
CLARA LAI
HANNAH DOWLING
QINLE JIN
SYLVIA TAN
YU YING CHAN