Yihan Pan and José Cárdenas’ twin images probe the darkness between life and dying

Where the guide is admittedly born was within the quiet, uncanny connections between pictures that captured “the ruin and feeling of uncertainty” rising up within the “third world” they grew up in, which they discovered to be genetically made up of deserted locations, fragile objects, industrial leftovers, traces of ecological collapse and moments the place nature and human buildings collided. In Uncertainties, the collision of images creates a menacing tone all through: the place one photograph reveals a hand holding a fragile crystal, the accompanying photograph reveals a smashed windshield. Where one facet of the unfold reveals a dilapidated toilet sink, the following reveals an inverted {photograph} of assault rifles lined up in opposition to the wall. Yihan and José enable the viewer to create the narrative, nonetheless unsure and open-ended it might be.

The duo have been drawn to topics that really feel fragile, ignored or unresolved, impressed by the “vertiginous nature of realising that they lived in the margins of the wider world”. The images have a textural interaction that’s fascinating – in a single diptych, a tv reveals fuzzy static and subsequent to it, a picture reveals an virtually cosmic, glittering downpour of rain. It recontextualises rain as a kind of pure static that occurs within the air. But each pictures seize the inbetween of locations, the inbetween of channels and the inbetween of floor and cloud.

“These images aren’t about China or Chile as national identities. They’re about what it feels like to grow up in places where everything is shifting faster than you can process,” says José. “We both come from regions marked by transformation — political, ecological, economic — and those tremors seep naturally into the work.” In a geographical sense, one can see tremors as a kind of almost-trauma, a vibration that might’ve been one thing a lot worse, like an earthquake or a flood. That similar rigidity carries via into Uncertainties, the uncertainty of what might have been, what might occur. This ambient violence manifests into pictures of canine’s jaws, a blaze, a rock placing water, a crushed bug, a useless chicken – pure occurrences that maintain savage potentialities.

“In Yihan’s images, you see the residues of China’s accelerated transformation in the form of precarious infrastructure and threats to wildlife,” says José. “Meanwhile In José’s images, you see the scars of extractive economies in Chile in the leftovers of big machinery and industrial leftovers,” says Yihan. “These parallels weren’t intentional but we found that the traces of the accelerated industrialization of the 20th century were present everywhere we looked in our past.” Accepting decay as a pure course of, even perhaps a stupendous course of, the guide’s primary theme is encapsulated in a photograph of two useless bunnies, one white, one black, holding one another in an everlasting stillness. But collectively, they turn into a yin-yang image, an acceptance of life and dying.