Art galleries project an essence that transforms whatever enters them. Their space is one of expectation, almost of a model, and their influence extends beyond simple presentation. This temporary assimilation offers new conditions for aesthetic and conceptual appreciation, which — replacing any direct function or reality — surround the artwork with an aura that becomes its new surface of contact with the world. The displaced object becomes alienated. A used spoon, chair, or car offers, within the gallery’s confines, a very similar experience, varying only through a thin, slightly anecdotal narrative thread. To recover its full charge, one must go beyond this constrained process of essentialization by fragmenting shared references.

Breaking away from the strict gallery paradigm challenges the limits of creativity as it confronts the limits of the acceptable, and more broadly, interrogates our own position to it. The extraction from the white cube reveals echoes of community-based constructions, with shared reference frameworks — a coherent space that embraces everything within it and passively or actively rejects the rest. Beyond the reassuring yet exclusive framework of community and resemblance, society offers a perspective on the world that is constantly shifting and decentred. Society WIP plays with these boundaries to question the social system within which we all evolve, to find richness of the fractures that sometimes split apart overly self-contained and serene entities.

In these conditions, pushing the opposite charges of resemblance and singularity, collaboration relies entirely on framed intention. The artworks overlap, at times clash, and then only can art truly emerge. Piece by piece, fragment by fragment, a large installation takes shape from simple elements: words, signs, colours, metal, objects, and recycled wood — all treated as materials of a vast reconstruction, forming a prototype of micro-society, enhanced with each new experience it generates — a work in progress whose energy stems from a beneficial instability.

Each object, idea, attitude, or behaviour is a complex blend of decision, use, heritage, and shared codes. Questioning the boundaries of the gallery does more than just facilitate the exchange of concepts and perspectives between its distinctive space and the elsewhere from which everything it houses originates. To break in order to remake — with the aim of rethinking the contexts that shape our experience — is not to propose a defined third space, nor any kind of solution. In this somewhat chaotic sensory spatiality — rich in both material and conceptual layers, a little messy, a little playful — the game of a decentred gaze is radically engaged. Art galleries carry no truth or validation.

Fragmenting these forms of reality to recombine them, shifting from political aesthetics to plastic aesthetics and return means transforming the exhibition into an experimental site of re-construction, where each idea, concept, object, and form of reality is rearranged to create a micro-proto-society of meaning and experience.

Society WIP is built on the dialectical foundation of two artists, aggregating two to provoke new agencies, only to be quickly dismantled in the visitor’s experience. It seeks to question society as an active curatorial phenomenon. Social rights, identity, religion, customs, pop culture and memories are set into motion, through the sincere yet irreverent eye of the artists. With giant bags screen-printed with random market pictures and clever ironic messages, Sanan Anuar reflects history back on itself by diverting the popification of activism into consumable objects, serving a more open concern toward religious injunctions. In his mural installation Gilang Propagila pushes the limits of words and images by projecting them onto an artificial stage wall, questioning the authenticity of intention. Both place signs at the heart of an ambiguity the exhibition does not claim to resolve. There are no messages or truth behind this controlled chaos, but rather a furious desire to provoke discomfort and a broader reflection about free and active expression.

Sanan Anuar and Gilang Propagila combine images and words as materials pushed to exhaustion. In the age of fluid contents, objectual anchors act as sensitive grips. An image without its own surface becomes slippery—and meaning slips with it. By reusing patterns and strong visual elements in a reduced set of combinatorics, they explore the richness of new possible experience to liberate their full charge.

Art constantly negotiates with insidious constraints. Every image arises from the vast system of language. Words enclose. Through them, through basic signs, consciousness is outlined within a constrained model – limits of which define an insidious enslavement, the comfort of a community, a magnetic nod. By refining its own coherence, the solid whole reflects on its impermeable surface the essentialised face of the Other. To escape from this subliminal gravitational force, one must superimpose greater agencies to provoke consciousness in return—a movement from meta-semiotics to macro-creativity. Intention stems in the broad strokes of the in-between. Like all living systems, language bears cracks artists joyfully inhabit.

Society stands in contrast with the centralized force of such a communal paradigm, stemming a new social shaping: no longer a carving that formalizes or a mould that rationalizes, but a collage of potentially exogenous elements shaped by a conscious operator—an act in itself, to reclaim control. The manner matters as much as the verbalization of intent. Gilang Propagila’s artworks are first signs and colours combined into indivisible concrete visuals. Sanan solidifies his patterns to better sculpt his own fragment of reality. Transparent meanings are delusive.

Frames operate on many scales to shape our vision, and theories push their solid -isms walls. Culture withers from being contemplated from the outside, tradition is its corpse. Looking backward is looking elsewhere, beside – it is already stepping out with no possible return. Image can be a guilty solidifier. At most, perhaps, remains the possibility of some intersecting paths.

Gilang Propagila and Sanan Anuar share fragments of similar trajectories – artistic development outside of classical education, and emancipation through punk scenes. Yet they diverged into frictional parallels—a vibrant oscillation of false overlaps. One impacts consciousness through illustration, playing with the boundaries of the image as a carrier of meaning in the service of language, the other provokes language through stable works subjected to the viewer’s questioning. Both interrogate and objectify meaning as a mouldable element; both perform sensitive intelligence.

What meaningful purity lies in Sanan’s Kelantanese past? What illusion hides behind the rooted essentialism of origin? Viewers would equally get lost trying to relate Gilang to any punk authenticity. Whether the boxes are checked/checkable or not doesn’t matter, down with the nauseating purities. The call to a codified aesthetic is above all a phenomenological grasp—a formalization, in the strictest sense, of an approach whose boundaries lie far beyond a strict referential framework.

To pin down Gilang Propagila or Sanan Anuar within the alternative scene or punk, and define it as such, is to invoke ghosts of once interconnected destinies. Historical punk is a colonial heritage, born in a specific place and time, half a century ago. To call on a heritage is to invoke a complex mechanism that contradicts the very reasons for its sincere adoption—values of assertion, fragmentation, voluntary recomposition, and DIY sociality. Let’s distinguish proud acknowledgement from labelling. Sanan Anuar does not wrestle with his past—he constructs. Gilang Propagila does not repeat a model—he uses it. And art arises through assemblage.

Society WIP rejects the idea of completion which brings closure, certainty, and antagonism. Its unstable rebounds engage us in an active journey, beyond the clashing intentions of its creators and the comfort of a defined and safe space. Objects and textures act, here, as meaning tracers to anchor a certain vulnerability in the viewer. Addition and disjunction highlight the different layers of experience from interaction with materials -including concepts- to symbolic or cultural consciousness. Outframing painting into installation, installation into a stage where the viewer originates its own fraction of circular experience breaks the illusional cycle of image and empty repeated words to reconnect with matter – either its narrative, sensitive charge or self-referring nihilism- and build thoughts.

By twisting echoes of everyday environments, the artists create the conditions of re-positioning and re-acting. Always society emerges out of will. Society WIP, as a sample of human playground, beyond all gender, religion, culture or ethnicity is above all an act of shared love, almost a sign of faith, and a big fat joke.

Altogether.

And that only matters.