Future Perfect presents the first solo exhibition by British artist Nathan Coley in Southeast Asia. Bringing together photographic and sculptural work from the past five years, the exhibition complements Coley's representation in the current Biennale of Sydney.

From the People, To the People, For the People explores the ritualised nature of protest and mourning, particularly with regards to their expression in civic space. More broadly, the exhibition explores how architecture conditions social behaviour, and questions the place of religion and ideology in the public sphere.

At the centre of the show is 'Choir' (2012), a series of five blank demonstration placards, made from painted steel, their slogans white-washed and muted by their diminutive scale. Although the message has been removed, these objects retain a political charge, functioning as a spectral testament to protest.

With ‘The Honour Series’ (2012), Coley reworks black-and-white photographs featuring spaces for public assembly, obscuring critical passages of the image with gold leaf so that viewers must look to other signifiers - gesture, environment, context - for meaning. In ‘03.03.09 (A)’, the subjects of one of the world’s most famed public sculptures, Auguste Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais’, are literally gilded, transformed into anonymous devotional objects, recalling their heroic self-sacrifice during the Hundred Years War.

In the ‘Square of the Three Powers’, Coley foregrounds a starkly rectilinear concrete structure designed by renowned architect Oscar Niemeyer that occupies a public square in Brasilia. Its function is ambiguous — it could be a bandstand for official declarations or a space for demonstrations — but the figures reclining at its edges suggest a failed utopian project. Golden skies cast this melancholy in relief, a lustrous backdrop to an abandoned modernism.

Adopting the aesthetic of the fairground sideshow, Coley’s illuminated text works speak to the role of religion in public life. While the non-denominational ‘Faith’ (2011) is a declaration of fundamental human belief, ‘Heaven Is A Place Where Nothing Ever Happens’ (2010) strikes a more agnostic note. An important strand of Coley's practice, these text pieces appropriate expressions from proverbs, news media and song lyrics, removing them from the original context and introducing new and ambiguous meanings.

With reference to the instruments of ideology (choirs, placards, demonstrations, prayer), Coley interrogates the ways in which civic life becomes freighted with symbolic political or spiritual significance. Through decontextualising and reframing them, he brings a critical awareness to bear on the spaces and places of protest and worship, proposing an alternative understanding of the public sphere.

-Future Perfect

Image: © Nathan Coley
Courtesy of the artist and Future Perfect