Be Beyond Being
Be Beyond being is a set of eight video 'glitches’ made to feature throughout the live panels of the London, Asia, Art, Worlds conference. This series of video works thinks through postcolonialism and posits it as a mutually violent system of exchange between the coloniser and the colonised. Through the modes of a disclaimer, a contract, a glitch, a map, an application and announcement, Sen presents a counter-narrative of postcolonialism from the voice of an ‘unHistoriographer’; a ‘terrorArtist’.
Each individual video was made as a response to the structure of the conference, taking the title of the conference sessions as an opening. For each conference panel, the video appeared during the live proceedings without any prior notice to the speakers or audience. This element of surprise was key to the subversion of the videos, and the idea of ‘glitch’ which informs them. The sudden appearance of the video as an alert or an announcement gave the effect of the glitch or a hack.
Sen writes that her idea was ‘to create a satire on the counter-imagination of post-colonialism, with a parallel existence of an unimaginable, interrupted, sabotaged, and glitched out the erasure of history.’
27 May
Sociality & Affect
An instructional manifesto/contract from a future untime, declaring the un-existence of the whole idea of post-colonialism in history
3 June
Potential Histories & Solidarities
An official announcement by the ‘company’ following the computational satire of deleting the error
4 June
Circulation & Encounter
The changing maps from the age of colonial cartography to the present-day ‘cloud space’ and how the changing colonisers are occupying the ‘space’ whether geographical or cloud/air space
10 June
Pedagogy & Learning
Screen recording of typing/editing/correcting of an application letter which carries the untold desires behind an application as well as the fear/ suspects behind the scholarship-giver's mind
11 June
Bureaucracy & Agency
A humorous intention disclosing the idea behind emptying the stolen art objects/repatriation to the origin of the countries and trying to make the empty museum building a monument of conceptual art of voids where the memory still holds the past
17 June
Aesthetics & Ways of Knowing
Zoom glitch: appearing in different avatars as zoom-bombers and creating chaos as a form of today’s new/digital aesthetic/politics
24 June
Thinking through Empire
Converting colonisers: vicious and virtuous conversion of different modes of colonisers' appearances over centuries
25 June
Thinking from Asia
A concluding manifesto, ‘thinking from Asia’, offering/creating a new un-identity as a ‘beyond being’ creature
