Author: Kar Kheng Gan

Regardless of the negative connotation for its common use in promoting exclusion and nationalism throughout history, Reading Babylon tries to look at architecture as a propagandistic tool through reimagining the definition of propaganda and reinterpret notion of our current ‘institution’ as an ‘imagined order’. Propaganda by definition is the “method of spreading biased or misleading information with the purpose of injuring or promoting an institution, cause or person”. However, we might argue that the ‘information’ we now receive so freely, in the post- truth era, are those that are selected to fit in with our already existing concepts of what actually constitutes the ‘real world’ or at least the cinematic, pre- narrated, real world. Often, what is being promoted is a highly filtered version of a selected reality which has now turned into a shared experience of reality, or for instance, should we call it, the ‘inter-subjectivity of an imagined order’. Our perceptions towards the world and how it works, the truth that lies within the implementation of law, money, religions and nations, are then questionable. Therefore, the collaboration of human beings in believing something is true, or the ‘imagined order’ as so-to-speak, now often constitutes to its existence being a universal ‘truth’, as understood by most human beings, which by definition, have no difference to the aftermath of a successful propaganda.

Размеры рисунка или рисунков (в см) / Sizes of the Drawing/Drawings (cm): 21 x 13 cm

Drawing technique / Техника исполнения : Paper, Pencil, Pen

Год исполнения / Year of the Drawing: 2016