Crepusculum

The Latin noun "crepusculum," which denotes twilight and transitional thresholds between day and night, also offers a compelling metaphorical framework for exploring fluidity and relational complexity in art. For artists, crepuscular zones can be fertile grounds for embodying tension and interplay, implicitly critiquing rigid categorisations and marking interstitial processes. In this exhibition, crepuscularity is repurposed to reach beyond established visual dichotomies to quietly intimate a complex set of entangled material, social, historical, philosophical and political domains. In contemporary art, crepuscularity might signal an approach that emphasise physical and perceptual thresholds or invite viewers to transcend established aesthetic or conceptual dualisms. From the Enlightenment through to modernity, light was conceptualised as a symbol of knowledge, rationality and progress. Yet this metaphor also invariably implied a binary oppositionality to darkness, and by extension, helped to establish the ground for a host of binary distinctions underpinning colonial and racial ideologies. Enlightenment's rationality, although radically liberating for some, would also entail a domination of nature, leading in part to forms of reason that are instrumental and reductive. Notwithstanding Romantic and mystical resistance to this tendency, the weight of this dualistic blindness was particularly resonant in the context of colonial expansion, where the 'illumination' of supposedly 'dark' continents paralleled an exploitative and oppressive devaluation of 'non-enlightened' cultures and peoples. Historically, this dichotomy has also contributed to a radical reorganisation of time and space and introduced new currency to the interplay of light and dark through a transformation of labour through mechanised time. Extended working hours would disrupt the natural cycle of day and night, ushering in a new era in which artificial light became a tool for extending productivity. In time, artificial light would be seen as not simply a symbol of progress and modernity but as a pernicious encroachment of industrial capitalism into the sanctity of night, traditionally a time of rest and respite. Against this backdrop, Crepusculum seeks to encapsulate a realm that is neither wholly light nor dark but rather occupying a continuum of reality that is necessarily intermingled and multiplicitious in nature. The exhibition also seeks to remind us of the inherent artificiality of clear-cut divisions of time and to instead see the interplay of light and dark as a profoundly complementary union. Here, our task is not to dispel darkness with blinding light but rather to appreciate the nuanced subtleties and gradations that twilight can reveal.