Angel Forest

Site specific in an undisclosed location, Singapore
June 2021

Angel Forest seeks an undoing, unmaking, and wilding of a self that’s bound within the limitations of our current world (And during the time of it’s install, the pandemic world). Where reality feels ever-shrinking, the volume of tragedy accumulating, and our lives increasingly fragmented, Angel Forest is a portal that metabolises the finite zeit into an enduring site. It holds the endevour to turn affect into agency; distilling vast, inconceivable emotions into tangible artefacts. Living agents that exist beyond time scales and human lifespans.

As a site specific art installation with its location only accessible via a secret and time sensitive telegram chat, Angel Forest is an invitation to engage in curiousity and play that jolts discovery out of a narrow mode of existence.

In terrible days when once again all is innundating and you’re wrangling yourself into some kind of workable order, there is a version of you that is transcendent. It carries with it a divine and essential identity that’s been untouched by a world that disavows, distorts, and corrupts you. Instead, it embraces you in every conveivable form. The metaphor for which is an angel; the perfect being to carry around the particularity of feeling you struggle to find meaning in, in a world where the scale of problems are too big to comprehend.

As a guide, the angel makes a portal – Angel Forest – an inevitable dissolving of limited human agencies into vast and ethereal entities. It is the highest expression of you and it is indefinite. It is tangible, it is penetrable, it is more light and enchanting than any kind of clarity. You, your life, your essence, and your personhood in this world may be constricted, but the angel is an agent for the immaculate idea of you, rather than the falibility of you.

Now you have a self that is free. Free to play in the forest; free to fail, free to make mistakes, free to cry, free to make friends with demons, free to simply be. This is the angelic quality. It is the quality of angel forest. It calls out to you. Into a timespan awat from limited iterations and a site away from hard realities – still and suspended – stretched into a nourishing, forgiving eternal.

@highlary

Credits:
Bryan, Sher, Akansha, Celine
Film documentation by Sarah Tan
Digital documentation by Elsa Wong