true names

A group exhibition considering naming as an ethical practice that can call forth and safeguard identities while opening a space for socio-political negotiation. About YDP presents true names, a group exhibition that considers naming as an ethical practice that can call forth and safeguard identities while opening a space for socio-political negotiation. Bringing together artworks emerging from contexts marked by shared struggles and overlapping concerns, the exhibition explores how relations among identity, spirituality and power are mediated and regenerated. A true name can mark a crossing between person and spirit, self and community, past and future. It may summon, bind, repair or restore passage between worlds. Yet a name may also be a wound, inviting misrepresentation and erasure. Diasporic and Indigenous communities have long histories of concealing or modifying names in response to displacement, assimilation and political violence. Moving between concealment and revelation, true names unsettles and disarms the colonial and capitalist impulse to identify and classify – to enclose – through naming. Concealment becomes an ethical act that protects dignity and preserves what would be transformed by being made fully available. Revelation, when it comes, ruptures the spell that turns recognition into capture. In true names, different magics, languages, histories and worlds brush against one another and remain in a living relation without being fully translated, possessed or made the same. true names is conceived and guest-curated by Yuan Fuca, in collaboration with YDP curator Jun Shen.