“At the end, instead of the disease metastasizing, it is the love that proliferates.”

—Himali Singh Soin

Throughout 2024, the world remained shrouded in division and conflict, war, protectionism, extreme climate events, and disease. Drawing on the ancient wisdom anchored in the term “munus” (which carries connotations of both obligation and gift), citing bar continued and deepened various concepts and practices centered around care and decolonisation that began in 2023. Through reading groups and various collective gatherings, we attempt to explore: “In this wounded world, what kind of contemporary healing wisdom can we co-create by being together?” (munus is the root of “community”)

The curatorial project “munus” is founded on the inspirations and challenges faced by these fluid reading groups, further focusing on the perspective of immunity (munus is also the root of “immunity”). It steps into ambiguous and uncomfortable territories, including the complicit debt that life carries, our collective “cultural dis-ease,” and what “Hospicing Modernity”* points to—the gray areas, contradictions, and translucent realities that language cannot penetrate—and how these create the (im)possibility of solidarity and healing.

The first half of the munus exhibition is based on artist Himali Singh Soin’s manifesto of “On Translucency”. In recent years, the artist’s work has revealed forgotten stories and speculated on alternative futures through material/media such as ice, oil, and salt. Between clear transparency and absolute opacity, it moves toward non-human wisdom—accepting the impossibility of omniscience, allowing emotional disturbance, conditionally revealing/concealing/absorbing information, being both independent and interconnected. As the artist put, “Translucency is a way of seeing the world- indefinite, leaky, and porous, with osmotic membranes between everything-  in a different light.” 

The main body of the exhibition is the Static Range series, which spans from the Himalayas during the Cold War era, to the UK’s Sellafield nuclear industrial park, to the Marshall Islands as the site of US Pacific nuclear testing. Within the many hued, glistening, fluorescent, burnt nuclear flows, it imagines intercepted or lost messages. The work traverses from the perspectives of mountains, atoms, birds, medicinal herbs, and deities, overlapping multiple temporal universes of deep time, histories of human love and suffering, and sudden and unknown ecological disasters. It opens up the singular narratives that restrict us within various modern dependencies on nation, security, stability, and engages in intimate dialogue with the resulting violence of pollution and censorship. The symbols that permeate and conduct in between are both warning messages and healing prescriptions, just as the  mountain tells the atom in ‘Affirmation’, ‘ “this letter holds many elsewhere together.”

However, this is not merely a romantic ballad praising healing and cross-species solidarity. Rather, it is the perception of an extremely complex reality through the lens of a murky apocalyptic spectacle—”interconnection” is never only beautiful; what’s entangled together are also scars and toxicities. What we believe we are pursuing and resisting at opposite ends of a linear spectrum are actually mixed into every living moment, even depending on each other—cures are contained in toxicity, divinity in degradation, and failure and endings also conceal love and blessings.

*The book ‘Hospicing Modernity’ is a vital inspiration for this project, full title: Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, written by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, 2021