Artha, 2024, Three Channel Projection Installation (Photo: Wenxuan Wang)
Artha, that renders and reinterprets key moments from Andrei Tarkovsky and Werner Herzog’s films. The left channel draws on Tarkovsky’s Stalker, depicting surreal, desolate landscapes that represent the invisible boundaries of exile. The animation mirrors the stillness and ambiguity of the Zone, presenting a terrain where past and present intersect in a space defined by both hope and despair.
The right channel reimagines Herzog’s Auguirre, the Wrath of God, transforming its relentless river journey into a chaotic, dreamlike flow. The animation reflects the historical struggles of displaced peoples navigating colonial violence, framing Aguirre’s doomed quest as a metaphor for exile, ambition, and loss. The centre channel sees displacement as no longer tied to any specific geography but as a universal, fluid condition. It reflects the internal experience of diaspora - fragmentation, memory, and the search for belonging in an unfamiliar world.
The darkened gallery not only resembles the room in Stalker - a space of yearning and unfulfilled desires - but, through the acoustic insulation lining the gallery floor, absorbs footsteps and amplifies a pervasive sense of solitude, or the psychological weight of diasporic experience, as if the room itself holds the accumulated memories and silenced histories of those in exile.