Spectral Evidence

Spectral Evidence is a real-time installation about objects that exist only in custody: Chinese Buddhist sculpture that was decapitated, cut from cave walls, and sold by the fragment into museums on three continents. Ninety-four of these artifacts return as unstable fields of light, each annotated with its own case file — the institution holding it, the dealer who moved it, the rights that govern its image. The fields do not hold by themselves. A figure gathers into a body while people stand and look at it, and loosens when they go. But looking is never enough to keep it: the work reads a live feed of world news, and a report of heritage destruction anywhere on earth will pull the figure apart while a room full of people is watching. Coherence here is not something these objects possess. It is something an audience lends them, on terms set elsewhere.