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Spectre System reimagines the spectral afterlives of plantation economies in the Malay Peninsula, a region once deeply entangled in the British Empire’s pursuit of wealth. The work is guided by the presence of the Inaivu—spectral orbs whose name merges the Tamil word ninaivu and the Malay word ingatan, both meaning “memory.” These beings drift through the landscape as agents of remembrance, carrying the weight of histories too often silenced or forgotten. Through them, the work explores how witnessing and haunting operate across the threshold between colonial pasts and contemporary realities.

Mirroring the spectral through grounded, slow movement, the animation drifts across a hauntingly familiar plantation-scape. The sound of laboured breathing reverberates throughout, an audible trace of the physical toll exacted by racialized labour and displacement. Hovering just above the terrain, the Inaivu linger as silent witnesses, suspended between visibility and oblivion. Through their quiet observation, the work traces a line between the migration of South Indian indentured workers in colonial Malaya and the disembodied nature of labour in today’s financialised economies.

As the narrative progresses, it transitions into AI-generated imagery produced with Stable Diffusion, revealing distorted hands, shifting landscapes, and ghostly economic structures. These visuals collapse temporal and spatial boundaries, reflecting the enduring logic of extraction and disembodiment under global capital. Here, the body emerges as both a vessel of memory and a vanishing form – stretched, moulded and ultimately obscured by systems that continue to extract without end.

This tension is extended in Mesh: Prelude to Spectre System, a vinyl print of elongated, contorted arms suspended in mid-motion. Reflecting the elasticity of rubber, these hands blur the boundaries between body and environment. They gesture toward the ghostly residues of labour, tracing how its impact lingers across temporally, spatially, and materially, imprinting itself onto the lived conditions of the present.