P for Power
2026
Ho Tzu Nyen adds a new entry to his ongoing Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia. Ho delves into diverse notions of power—from political and religious authority to natural and evolutionary force—while tracing their entanglements with democracy, history, technological development, capitalism, and colonialism. Ho approaches Power as he does Time: an ungraspable, universal concept that persistently resists stable definition.
The video installation unfolds across 30 real-time edited chapters. Drawing on found footage from the internet, each chapter is gradually transformed over the course of the exhibition through an Artificial Intelligence (AI) video-generation process. Every chapter is structured around a dialogue between the artist and an AI chatbot, probing what power might be.
Beginning with animist conceptions of power found across Southeast Asian cultures, the work is also deeply informed by Baruch Spinoza’s understanding of power—not as domination or superiority, but as the capacity to affect and to be affected. Amplified through sensitivity and sustained through persistence, power appears here as something that continues to vibrate across time, intensifying through what it touches. As Ho puts it: “Power not as domination, but as endurance, consistency, coherence over temporal extension.”
