All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
—J. M. COETZEE, Waiting for the Barbarians
Even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.
Like the rising sun that shines, from the darkness comes a light…
(Still) Out of Africa, but it will have me soon…
“Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems I am trying to tell you a dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams.”
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Part 1
“The Necessary Tension of Possibility”
Simon Brewer, 2010
“Nothing that is wholly evil can exist.” - Thomas Aquinas, 1225-1274
Contextualized in the choices of Khmer Rouge executioner Comrade Duch, our judgments and responses to them and depicted in the ambiguous and darkened interior of the scene of his most horrendous war crimes, The Necessary Tension of Possibility explores the ever-present tension between darkness and light.
The state of conflict between forces of good and evil manifest in the human psyche presents itself most strikingly in the context of the most abhorrent of acts – and to understand the possibility of the existence of hope amidst overwhelming death, destruction and suffering is in fact to experience a glimpse of the very faith that exists in evil.
During the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia from April 1975 to January 1979, a former high school in Phnom Penh was transformed into a prison commonly known as S-21. As many as 20,000 men, women and children passed through its gates before being brutally tortured and killed under the orders of its chief executioner, Comrade Duch.
Thirty-one years later Duch, or Kang Kek Iew, now 68, having worked as a school teacher in the province of Battambang and converted to Christianity, has stood on trial and is awaiting sentence. A shadow of evil hangs over the former prison. The potential for good though is now discernible and the reconciliation the former executioner seeks is now a possibility.
The focus of each of the images in this exhibition, the doorway, as a point of entry and exit, acts both as a point of access to the ‘outside’, to the unknown, though also as a tool of constraint, a barrier to that very place. The viewer is separated from the light (reconciliation, hope) and held within the darkness (remembrance); at once constrained within the blackness and yet drawn into the unknown possibilities of the light. The tension is further underscored through the contrast between the ordered, ridged mathematical forms within the building and the ragged, crude lines of destruction and the madness scarred upon its surfaces.
The prison, formerly a French Lycée, now functions as a museum of remembrance, the embodiment not only of a regime descended into insanity, but also of the potential for renewal born from the darkest of acts. The images don’t explicitly show these acts, though they exist in the darkness of memories and the corners of the imagination – a place from which we, too,
desire relief, respite, an exit.
“Man is the greatest enemy of man. Oppression, injustice, contempt, contumely, violence, sedition, war, calumny, treachery, fraud; by these they mutually torment each other.”
David Hume, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, 1711-1776
“They see only their own shadows or the shadows of one another, which fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave.”
Plato, 428-348 BC
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
John 1, Verse 5
