Earth Now
78 x 208 cm
These flags depict a cacophonous landscape of the earth’s languages. The white-noise-like image collapses the words in 145 different languages that mean “now”: from the Spanish “ahora” to the Chinese “现在,” or from the Afrikaans “nou” to the Zulu “manje.” “Now” – the word and the idea – is interesting as it suggests the speaker’s intimate relation to her or his time, while the meaning is often vague outside a specific context. We think it captures something about how we occupy our history, concretely and indeterminably.
- Project type:
- ambiguous
- Commissioned by:
- Oh Sunyoung
- Exhibited as part of:
- Elephant in the Room (Jakarta History Museum, 2018)
Photograph by courtesy of Oh Sunyoung
