[Foot Step Approach]

Wimo Ambala Bayang’s solo exhibition offers a provocation toward a hermeneutic understanding of the image. The exhibition title, [Foot Step Approach], is a phrase drawn from the artist’s personal notebook, which here becomes the fulcrum for the curatorial framework.

Footstep becomes a metaphor for three key concepts: trace, movement, and temporality. Meanwhile, approach triggers a dual valence—at once “approach” in its conceptual sense (a “guiding framework for thought”), and “approaching” in its literal sense (a “form of action”). The term thus constitutes a poetic disposition in which the metaphor of the “footstep” may be apprehended both as a way of thinking and as a way of acting.

These three key concepts interweave across the works—photography, painting, mural, sonic composition, and video art—within an effort to re-polemicize the antagonistic relation between aura and reproducibility. Wimo’s works in this exhibition disclose critical issues in the hermeneutics of the image: the transgression of the boundary between text and image as an aesthetic politics; the politicization of art as an awakening of consciousness regarding the operational systems of the art world; and a renewed critique of aura as a new form of emancipation within contemporary sociocultural realities.

Beyond reflecting the artist’s attention to the issues of trace-movement in space-time—entwined with questions of materiality, the nature of medium, the presence of technology, social spatiality, the temporality of events, and collective memory—[Foot Step Approach] also represents Wimo’s poetics of approach toward the potential of photography and the image to be discussed more profoundly as part of a chain of mediations, an ecology of translation, and a vast system of signification. Wimo extends his exploration into the discourses of the image and its modes of production. The constellation of works presented articulates a spectrum of artistic strategies that both signify and interrogate the very nature of reflective understanding of contemporary visual culture, as well as the institutional mechanisms of contemporary art that simultaneously inhabit and shape that culture.

In a time when meaning is always on the move—approaching us yet never quite arriving, only to pass by and leave behind a mere trace—it is there that the artist assumes the role of translator and conductor of context. []

Presented by kohesi Inititiatives