There’s an odd, enigmatic timbre to the title of Allan Balisi’s new show, Beggars Fortress. But it makes sense given how beggars are essentially creatures of never-ending desire. And Balisi is ruminating on its melancholies. But this is desire for the sake of desire, desire without the promise, let alone the catharsis, of coveting. Desire and the obscurity and impossibility of its objects.

Desire as a metaphor for the condition of a beggar, which is literally rooted in want, and this specific permutation of want at that, a want not out of avarice, but rather a want tempered by futility, a cul-de-sac of wanting, not just what you cannot have, but what you cannot want, and how much this wanting persists in our lives and how we have enclosed ourselves within its walls, like a fortress, really, which in a way, can also be a prison, impregnable on both sides, fortified as much for keeping things in as it is for keeping things out. There’s a persistent fugitive element to the work, a sense of information withheld, of narratives collapsed, an obfuscation that may be deliberate or not, but ultimately belies the immediacy of the images, which are as investigative as it is introspective, yet somehow more given over to the mystery than to the solution, less interested in cracking the codes than in the codes themselves.

-Dodo Dayao

Image: © Allan Balisi
Unmade pictures gathering dust
2013