"A young woman sits in a New York subway carriage, a number of days after the terrorist attacks on the twin towers. It is early morning, and the city is grudgingly back at work. Like many of her fellow passengers, she is tired, emotionally fragile, confused and angry – still trying to come to terms with what has happened to her city.

A Sikh man sits opposite her, wearing a bright orange turban. There is a strong tangible sense of hatred from the passengers towards the man - a feeling of raw anger and disgust. The mans eyes are averted, the commuters stares un-replied. His head is bowed, he is sobbing.

The train travels on, stopping at the next station, the doors open and close, passengers get on and off. After a few stops and more torturous minutes, the man gathers his belongings and gets up to leave. Standing by the exit is a young black woman with a newly born baby. As the man approaches, he reaches into his pockets and takes out a handful of dollars. Without saying anything, he shoved the money into the folds of the baby’s clothes and exits the train. The doors close, and the remaining passengers burst into tears.

At that moment, the woman realises that for New York to get past the attack, to move on and rebuild itself, it has to think anew, it has to look again. It has to get to a place beyond belief."

The fifth in Coley’s ongoing series of illuminated text works consists of a brief stanza: A PLACE BEYOND BELIEF Four words stacked on three lines: indefinite article + noun / preposition / noun. The text is not a complete sentence, it has no verb, no punctuation, and it is written entirely in sans-serif capitals. As with the other works in the series, fairground lights describe the letters in lines and arcs. This is a large sculpture whose subject is mounted on scaffolding bars that have been fixed to the wall or anchored to the floor. The physical nature of the work is paradoxical: its rudimentary construction suggests a temporary roadshow advertising the latest ride or quack scheme or the vehicle for erecting something permanent. However, the simplicity of its structure and its lack of adornment carries its own authority, endowing the glowing script with the inviolability of a calling or a promise. Without incidental effects, the gnomic phrase is suspended in isolation like a mantra to be digested and learned. Yet this axiomatic quality is itself at odds with the nature of the text whose precise meaning remains beyond reach. “A place beyond belief.” What does this text / sculpture describe? Where is the place designated by the title—this place the viewer shares with the sculpture, or that place, “the hill beyond the hill you can see,” as Coley has referred to it? Does it exist already or is it utopia, a hypothetical place that will never exist. The work consists of metal poles, nuts and bolts, a transformer, and some lightbulbs, though its primary concern is with the non-plastic oral tradition of storytelling and communication via words. Continuing Coley’s ongoing engagement with the ready-made, the source of this sculpture is a phrase edited from a verbal testimony he heard. Listening to the radio on the morning of the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks he was struck by a woman recounting an experience on the subway a few days after the towers fell. She described the collective, implicit hostility of her fellow New York commuters toward a Sikh man also on board the train, highlighting raw prejudices that cast a man in a turban as an outsider to be feared and loathed. Recalling her shame at their treatment of this man, she describes knowing that “to move on, New York needed to become a place beyond belief.” Echoing the ideological split that was projected between an outsider “you” and an insider “us” on the subway carriage, Coley’s sculpture is concerned with belonging and community. Its three lines, “A Place,” “Beyond,” “Belief,” each separately relate to concepts of in- and ex-clusivity, whether physical or ontological, and take up a theme that runs throughout Coley’s practice: the notion of personal identity in relation to the group. In his work, the viewer is repeatedly addressed by a voice assuming authority and asked either to believe or reject what is pronounced. In certain cases, this directive offers a simple choice: There Will Be No Miracles Here (2010); Heaven Is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens (2008); We Must Cultivate Our Garden (2006). In The Honour Series (2012), the viewer’s response to the demonstrators depicted across the photographs in different locations and supporting various causes, is complicated by the concealed slogans on their placards. A Place Beyond Belief (2012) is more ambiguous again because its offer is so enigmatic, to the extent of it being barely understandable as a choice or ambition at all. Whether, in the terms of Coley’s re-contextualization of the phrase, the idea of A Place Beyond Belief is either conceivable or desirable remains moot. But the work is not blind or deaf. Conceived by having listened to a stranger tell their story via airwaves transmitted from one continent to another, the work speaks from and for the human collective. To quote Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author,” it has been “drawn from the innumerable centers of culture” and “its unity lies not in its origins, or its creator, but in its destination or its audience.”