Vigil:
Death & The Afterlife

Bora Akinciturk, Maksud Ali Mondal, Honey Baker, DaddyBears, Doron Beuns, Ernest Bessems, Lily Bloom, Szilvia Bolla, Kate Burling, Šimon Chovan, Jamie John Davies, Folkert De Jong, Necker Doll, Leon Scott-Engel, Phoebe Evans, Ella Fleck, Max Otis King, K.T. Kobel, Anna-Lena Krause, Nataliya Zuban, Harry Hugo Little, Andrei Nițu, Tomasz Skibicki, Bregje Sliepenbeek & Salomé Wu.

A Foreword by Curator Isabella Greenwood

The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘vigil’ as a period of wakefulness, typically observed between death and burial when people watch over the sick or mourn the deceased. To keep vigil is to engage in an embodied confrontation with mortality, asserting the very precarity of one’s own existence in the face of another’s passing. Derived from the Latin vigilia, meaning ‘wakefulness’ or ‘watch,’ the act of keeping vigil is paradoxically marked by depletion: in keeping watch, or staying awake, we become increasingly dissociated. Keeping vigil, and other post-mortem practices articulate cultural values: destigmatising decay while affirming identity and symbolic continuity.

If wakefulness has the potential to be inherently depleting, then, how do we actively keep vigil in our own lives, both figuratively and literally. What does it mean to closely, and attentively, observe all aspects of transmutation and where does our inherent fear of staying ‘awake’ and observing death arise from? The concept of death bears both literal and symbolic resonance, though in both forms, the meaning is the same– something is discarded, metamorphosed, creating something new. Despite historical and religious injunctions that have long framed death as an ultimate passage, whether to an afterlife or oblivion, contemplation of what happens after death is either approached with curiosity, fear or avoided altogether.

Achille Mbembe notes in Necropolitics, that death has been relegated to the margins of civic space, stripped of its ritual potency, and subordinated to a biopolitical logic that seeks to manage and obscure mortality. The Western aversion to death becomes a symptom of our attempts to regulate meaning through life’s predictable cycles in fear that death might render obsolete the assurances through which we orient our lives. By evading the spectre of death and its accompanying abstractions, we elude the very essence of the vigil itself, and thus, to keep vigil, is a radical interruption—a refusal to let the symbolic order quietly assimilate death into the banal structures of modernity. It is of course, easier to live as though dying were an abstract form, when in reality, to live with the awareness of our inevitable death, and hopeful lives thereafter, is deeply life-affirming.

It is within this avoidance that Vigil: Death and the Afterlife finds its conceptual genesis. This exhibition engages in an aesthetic dialectic with mortality, alternate realities, and speculative afterlives, challenging viewers to position themselves as active witnesses.