Institutional Longing: 1001 Nights features four video episodes of a narrated series of poems written response to archival documents at the Royal Asiatic Society and experiences within its reading room and archivist office. The episodes alternate between a longing correspondence between the narrator to an unknown lover and analysis of colonial documents.
Loosely drawing its form from the frame story of 1001 (Arabian) Nights, where narrator Scheherazade shares an unending series of tales to Persian King Shahriyâr to defer execution, the episodes consider the ways in which orientalism shapeshifts and manifests in contemporary neoliberal cultural institutions, and the manufacturing of desire from an 19th century banquet menu to K-pop.
Key archival items include the banquet menu, Sir Stamford Raffles’ gravestone, kept in RAS storage, a donated lithograph of a corpse flower (rafflesia arnoldii) he ‘discovered’ with Joseph Arnold, and a letter from Jiaqing Emperor to George IV. (Full audio episodes on Sound Cloud).
00 perennial metronome (6:53 min)
01 Aladdin is set in China (5:04 min)
03 Vitrine Fever (7:19 min)
05 Soup in Chinese & Salad in Akkadian (4:20 min)