The Light At The End Of The Tunnel Has Been Turned Off (Detail)

Mawen Ong's installation The Light At The End Of The Tunnel Has Been Turned Off, created in 2009.
The work was exhibited in the same-titled exhibition curated by Roberto Chabet at Green Papaya Art Projects from 11 February to 7 March 2009.

Excerpt from the exhibition notes by Lena Cobangbang:
'There is said to be truth in illumination. But the fluorescent glow that shines upon objects that are supposed to illuminate one’s pondering about the sublime (through art) often bear instead a greenish-bluish cast of sterile indifference like corpses in a morgue, or rather like expiring fruits in a grocer’s bin. When this happens, the commonplace things occupy rather one’s wonderment. Thus, banality is lent with that pall of associative dreaming deftly enabled by the frame, the cropping of a document, the snapshot, the very portable ready-mades of a highly consumerist and spectator-partisan culture.

This is no truer than Mawen Ong’s 28 lightboxes of light switches and electrical sockets found in the various art spaces, galleries, and museums in Manila and abroad that she’s visited – all looking nondescript as from a hardware catalogue, some crudely taped and painted over to feebly camouflage itself as part of the pristineness of the wall where an artwork should be the main attraction.

Ong’s penchant for the common things that are uncommonly taken interest by most such as trash cans, blank billboards, and shrouded infrastructure belie the weariness and boredom of a forced touristic enchantment. These things that are supposed to be hidden or taken out of the picture or thought to otherwise rob the picturesqueness of the scene are instead brought to focus as a coercive conspiracy to look at microscopically these things that pervade the same space of supposed attractions.

It is as though Ong’s pictured switches are the mechanisms to such withdrawal from the cacophony of these manufactured and mediated images. Yet the means itself – digitally printed photographs of switches and plugs encased in light boxes, plugged into actual sockets, running on the gallery’s electrical power supply – short circuits on its own by its tautological ontology.'

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Online

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documenter
Publication/Creation date

2009

Creation place

Philippines

Medium

Duratrans, lightbox

Dimension

Variable dimensions

Content type

artwork documentation

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The Light At The End Of The Tunnel Has Been Turned Off (Detail)