A large-scale installation of glittering, ‘mirror’ bombs raining down, Bomba summons the zeitgeist of contemporary times: of heady excess and hedonism—and creation—amidst catastrophic violence and destruction. It evokes the aftermath of Manila during WWII, which was the most heavily bombed city after Warsaw; ironically, the bombs were unleashed by the Americans in their attempts to ‘liberate’ their colony. More recently, installed in the Philippines Stock Exchange in Manila, Bomba raised the spectre of the recent collapse of major financial institutions, sending markets worldwide spiralling out of control. The Tagalog word ‘bomba’ broadly translates as ‘exposed’ and ‘naked’, stripping bare the true intentions that lie beneath the grandiose words of politicians and world leaders. This immersive work alludes to the willingness of individuals to turn a blind ear and eye to the terrors of real life, as they fly in the face of reason to revel in the desperate absurdity of the world. Mesmerizing and menacing at the same time, Bomba is a death-defying disco, a reckless party for the end of the world. 

Sitting comprises 366 carved figurines, each seated in a meditative posture, their number referencing the total number of days in a (leap) year. They poetically mark the passage of time, and serve as embodiments of mindful perseverance and the importance of keeping at this practice, day after day. This meditative repetition encourages a certain stillness and looking within oneself, thereby giving rise to self-awareness and peace as one is reconciled with the world. Instead of orienting one’s thought and actions to the external world as we are wont to do, here, sitting and stillness are the paths to an inner utopia, as our mind’s eye turns inward.

Chinese artist Shen Shaomin’s installation, Summit, was conceived as a response to the financial crisis of the late-2000s, through the doom and gloom of which prophesies of capitalism’s end, and the collapse of the existing world order, were rife. Shen came of age during the grim years of the Cultural Revolution in China, and envisaged the work as his riposte to these predictions. Taking as a point of reference the annual G8 Summit where national leaders meet to discuss world affairs, he has created a hypothetical meeting of the leading figures of leftist politics—a meeting hardly distinguishable from that bleakest of assemblies: a wake.

There also runs beneath Summit a rich vein of irony. The display of Mao’s body here recalls immediately the spectacle of the actual corpse as it in lies perpetually in state in the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall on Tiananmen Square. Nothing could be further from the sight of long lines of people—many with flowers in hand—queuing to catch a glimpse of Mao’s waxy remains, than the forlorn, deserted hush that envelopes the tableau of death and decay that Shen has orchestrated. Like its human representatives, the ideology of Communism today seems to hold out only the promise of ultimate failure, a cadaver preserved as a lifeless, moribund shell.