Issue 69 | The Unstable Archive: Imagining History, Nation, and Future

• 2020

Are those lie in the past absolutely irrefutable and unchangeable? Or those in the future, unde-termined and therefore useless? When reflecting upon the history, we tend to seek guidance from the seemingly rational historical data or other distinguishable traces. Written records and visual documentations are often undoubted in their ability to represent historicity and the truth. Coupled with cultural hegemony, certain dominant interpretations of the past have fed us with a historiographic mindset of linear progression and relative static colonial imagery. The guest speakers of this issue have been trying to intervene in such conceptualization of history through their respective art practices. One draws reference from ancient legends while the other envi-sions a future in space, both questions the mainstream historiography about the objective and neutral gaze it sets upon and the boundaries it marks around the cultural and racial Other. By breaking away from the stable and one-way imagination of the history, the nation, and the fu-ture, they have found alternative ways to rethink the historical data, the (pre/mid/post-) coloni-al, the multicultural experience, and globalization.