sea through hollow mirrors (/ after John and Vera)

video, 2024
Installed alongside fujiflex print, rocks from Dover beach

A summoning of ghosts that lie behind maritime chokepoints, the work ponders on Dover, a landscape that once, much like Singapore, stood formerly one of the ‘strategic keys’ of the world, as per British admiral John Fisher.

Taking a refracted psychic landscape of the shoreline on the Dover port, and playing it out against a decaying sample of Vera Lynn’s ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’, the work, hinting at elements of psychogeography and hauntology, concerns itself with faceless histories, speaking to anxieties behind a historical rupture and its aftermath of endlessly accelerating globalisation. Melding recordings from within lonely trumpeters from Dover’s town square, a beating heart amidst shorelines, sounds of glitched-out rocks and ever-advancing waves, and the former pride of howling factory hums, the work traces what is left behind after globalisation’s ghost, and the forgetting that ensues in between.