Present Elsewhere

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Rashid Rana subverted expectations at FIELD MEETING with a last-minute request for curator Leeza Ahmady to select another artist to embody his presence—playfully deceiving an audience expecting to see him. Christopher K. Ho embraced the challenge, presenting The Syllabus, a lecture-performance posing seven open-ended questions to artists creating political art beyond the long shadow of 1968. This act of substitution became a direct experiment in Rana’s exploration of the tension between presence and absence, the actual and the remote—between direct experience and knowledge accumulated across time and space. “Our experience of reality is usually a negotiation between the two,” he explains. By having Ho stand in for him, Rana prompted the audience to question whether presence can exist autonomously, echoing multiverse theories that blur linear time and reveal fractured, non-hierarchical perspectives,challenging fixed narratives and notions of individuality.