Future Perfect presents For the people, To the people, From the people

PUBLISHED February 12th, 2014 10:09 pm | UPDATED May 9th, 2018 03:13 am

Future Perfect is pleased to present 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), Cole
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.