SAW in Dubai
In a unique collaboration with the Singapore Pavilion at World Expo 2020 Dubai, alongside with our partnering agency, Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA), Singapore Art Week (SAW) 2022 takes over the Sky Market from 14 to 23 January 2022. Across the 10 days, SAW will offer an exclusive taster into the Singapore visual arts ecosystem to the Dubai audiences, featuring original Arts Series like Pretty Exciting Stuff, a Special Presentation of The Cup by Mark Chua & Lam Li Shuen and Digital Artworks featured as part of SAW like Not For Sale, Happy House, Proximities, amongst many others!
For more Digital Experience like this, do check our SAW Digital microsite at: artweek.sg/digital
Screening Schedule
Art Series: 17 Jan (Mon) & 20 Jan (Thur), Timing Varies
Digital Artworks: 14 – 16 Jan (Fri – Sun), 23 – 30 Jan (Sun – Sun), 5:30 PM
Special Presentation: 14 – 16 Jan (Fri – Sun) , ), 5:00 PM
All timings stated here are in Dubai time (GMT +4).
Art Series
1. Pretty Exciting Stuff
by National Arts Council
Screening Times:
17 Jan (Mon), 5:30 PM
Pretty Exciting Stuff is a video series featuring 12 conversations between everyday Singaporeans and talented artists. Get to know them and understand their practice across a diverse range of media like sculpture, photography and watercolour.
Artist List: Ong Kim Seng & Karina | Zen Teh & Rita | ila & Miranda | Victor Tan & Sabriel | Milenko Prvacki & Clarity | Ashley Yeo & Perry | Barry Yeow & Jack | Zulkhairi Zulkiflee & Kavita | Stephaine Jane Burt & Ain | ZERO (Zul Othman) & Yong Siang | Nature Shankar & Lim Ziyu | Debbie Ding & Mehboob Shah
2. Rewritten
by National Arts Council
Screening Times:
To be confirmed
“Rewritten” presents 14 text-based public artworks by Singapore artists, contemplating the multitude of changes – from the minute of the tremendous – experienced in our daily lives since the onset of COVID-19.
The artworks were distributed across eight parks spanning east to west – Ang Mo Kio Park, Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park, Jurong Lake Gardens, Lorong Halus Bridge, Lower Seletar Park, Luxus Hills Park, Punggol Waterway Park, Sengkang Riverside Park – resembling visual poetry unfurling across the island, awaiting discovery.
Featured Artist: Robert Zhao, Ang Song Nian, Seah Sze Yunn, Regina De Rozario, Justin Loke, Dawn Ng, Weimin Lai, Yasira Yusoff, Jerome Ng, Zed Hann, Adeline Loo, Cheong Yew Mun, Hun Ming Kwang, Hunny and Lummy, Hanson Ho, Cheryl Chiw, Namiko Chan Takahashi, Aaron Lee, Sam Lo, Petrina Dawn Tan, James Tan
3. State of the Arts: Shubigi Rao & Robert Zhao
by The Institutum
as part of State of the Arts
Screening Times:
State of the Arts: Shubigi Rao - 17 Jan (Mon), 6:30 PM
State of the Arts: Robert Zhao - 20 Jan (Thur), 6 PM
Robert Zhao. Photo courtesy of The Institutum.
State of the Arts delves into an artist’s practice through the medium of short video interviews. This series of video interviews allow artists to share a glimpse into their practice, lives and philosophies. The studio visit interviews are conducted by leading Singaporean and Southeast Asian artists and curators. The videos will be available on SAW Digital, as well as the Institutum’s website and YouTube channel.
Featured Artist (All): Robert Zhao (SG), anGie Seah (SG), Amanda Heng (SG), Chen Yanyun (SG), Pio Abad (PHL/LDN)
Digital Art Works
Screening Times:
14 – 16 Jan (Fri – Sun), 23 Jan (Fri - Sun), 5:30 PM
(in chronological order)
1. What you don't know, you won't miss
by Adeline Kueh
as part of Somewhere in Bedok blooms the blushing rouge of embroided roses
What you don't know, you wont miss (2022) Adeline Kueh.
Stepping into Johann’s studio, one is transported into another space in time - like time travel. Drawing reference from a literary text and art history, Proust’s and Monet’s madeleine preoccupations felt apt for this exhibition as they represent an extension into my research practice about intimate labour and care, and kueh-kueh making. The space also always makes me reflect on our own complex positioning and entanglements with Euro-American colonial expansion and histories. As an intervention, “What you don’t know, you won’t miss” brings together the embodied ritual of preparing food.
Here, they manifest specifically in the processes of baking via an ASMR video, denial of access to the actual madeleines but more significantly, the foregrounding of the cycle and elements of life in the tropics that come into play with the madeleines: the butterfly pea plant and powder, humidity, contamination, pollution, mould and decay become this uncanny mix in this minimal installation within the decadence of this space somewhere in Bedok.
2. XxHaven_KitchenxX
by Nelly Tan & Farizi Noorfauzi
as part of Fated Love Sky
XxHaven_KitchenX (2022) Nelly Tan & Farizi Noorfauzi.
XxHaven_KitchenxX attempts to unpack negative affects ascribed to ‘bad’ cooking in light of privileging naïve or nonsensical forms of knowledge practice. Exploring overlooked ingredients and re-imagining their importance in cooking, the work turns toward happy and productive failures in the process of recipe-making – forming yet another supper club-art collaborative encouragement.
3. Approximities
by Nina Djekić
as part of If Forest Talks 2021
Approximities (2021) Nina Djekić.
Approximities presents us with a series of seemingly everyday vignettes. However, as the characters move in and out of the frame, the scenes increasingly gain an air of artifice.
The film builds on my experiences visiting a local park while living in Singapore. Spending long stretches of time at the park without a particular aim in mind, it has allowed my thoughts to roam freely and gently, amidst the company of strangers. One by one, alongside the scenery and vegetation, these strangers became a familiar presence.
Reconstituting this familiar park space through my memories, I engaged with a group of friends in a long-distance choreography of enacting and translation. This process is a paradoxical task of establishing common ground within an artificially constructed situation.
Can we think of a park as a virtual space or vice versa, that enables us to gather regardless of physical distance? How do we rearticulate proximity under those conditions?
How do we spend time?
4. earth, land, sky and sea as palimpset
by Zarina Muhammad & Zachary Chan
as part of If Forest Talks 2021
Film Still from earth, land, sky and sea as palimpset (2021) Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan.
eath, land, sky and sea as palimpset by Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan are invitations and invocations to see with skin, hear with our feet, feel our way through spatial interruptions and somatically attend to sound at points of transit, change and threshold-crossing.
Each cumulative form of this long-term project is an invitation to reframe hegemonic cartographies, to conjure the ecologies of selves within the seen and unseen, and make memory maps from meandering through the homely and strange, the uninhabitable, the chthonic, the otherworlds and more than human worlds that we share habits and habitats with.
5. Proximities
by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee
as part of Proximities
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Image Credit: Zulkhairi Zulkiflee, Proximities.
Proximities is the first solo exhibition by Singaporean artist-curator Zulkhairi Zulkiflee. This debut exhibition at Objectifs focuses on a new video work surrounding Malay masculinities and their plural representation.
At the beginning of 2020, artist-curator Zulkhairi Zulkiflee focused on the trope of the Malay Boy found in the works of Singaporean artist Cheong Soo Pieng. An indirect extension that included a visual study of colonial postcards depicting the implicit relationship of boy and crocodile, and personal photographs of his father in the eighties, Zulkhairi's consistent interest in images and visuality is rigorously anchored by the Malay male body. Here, his works circulate key themes like representation, racialized masculinities, and Malay male identity formations. In the many Malay boy(s) of Cheong’s multiple yet elusive renditions, Zulkhairi attempts to locate the Malay male in art history while unpacking underlying systems of power that have shaped and naturalized understanding of difference. When exorcised from the framings of art history - one informed by overlapping lenses of pioneer artists and their Western predecessors, the Malay boy now stands as a figure (re)molded by contemporary currents and various intercessors.
Against such discourses, the exhibition primarily focuses on a video that foregrounds Malay masculinities and their plural representations — intersecting wide-ranging sources from art history to personal meditations.
6. Somewhere in Bedok blooms the blushing rouge of embroided roses: Walkthrough
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Bedok Coast, Marjorie Dogget (1957). National Archives of Singapore, THE NEST STUDIO.
Somewhere in Bedok blooms the blushing rouge of embroidered roses is a show staged in a HDB apartment, somewhere in Bedok. The space assumes the aesthetics and function of a living museum, having been decorated in Rococo and Georgian styles. From the gilded furnishings to the sculpted curves of the fixtures, to the collection of art and ornamental objects, including paintings, turn-of-the-century Chinoiserie and antique English and European porcelain, the mood is one of high visual drama. Its theatricality calls out to be deconstructed, and the exhibition explores the themes of domesticity and the uncanny in response to the material lushness of its environs. The Freudian uncanny embodies the tensions between what is familiar and comfortable and, conversely, what is concealed or erased - the un-familiar, or un-homely.
7. This Is My Brain on Demand
by Mark Chua (SG) & Lam Li Shuen (SG)
as part of It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want to, You Would Cry Too If It Happened to You
)
Film Still from This Is My Brain on Demand (2022) Mark Chua & Li Shuen.
This Is My Brain On Demand is a conversation with the spirit of the Singaporean ideal. The local ethos, according to the artists, is an almost ineffable idealization of certain ways of life - often utilitarian value systems and states of relations that seem to run through both the personal and the collective. The work is an installation comprising a coin-operated crocodile ride and a television monitor, centered on a moving image sequence depicting crocodilian characters basking at a swimming pool. Exploring the anxieties emerging from difference and otherness, the short film is a psychedelic, expressive attempt to wrestle the individual into coexistence with the Singaporean ideal, visually foregrounding the vividness found in films such as Shuji Terayama’s “Pastoral: To Die In The Country” (1974) and Derek Jarman’s “Jubilee” (1978).
8. NOT FOR SALE
Curated by Kristine Tan & Gillian Daniel
Featured Artist: Debbie Ding (SG), Chong Yan Chuah (MY), Yeyoon Avis Ann (KR)
You Press The Button (2022) Debbie Ding. Courtesy of the artist.
NOT FOR SALE is an artwork commission that invites three artists – Debbie Ding, Chong Yan Chuah and Yeyoon Avis Ann – to create new site-specific speculative video works that co-opt the language of advertising in order to interrogate our entrenchment within a state of advanced capitalism exacerbated by digital technology.
Advertisements can be read as cultural artefacts as they both mould and mirror a society’s desires and ideals, hopes and fears. Unlocking this potential, the artists interrogate the current state of affairs, to pave the way forward for alternative futures. Utilising the language and format of traditional advertising, these videos will play on a five-storey digital billboard outside Fortune Centre and a new billboard at Kinex Mall during Singapore Art Week 2022.
NOT FOR SALE is curated by Kristine Tan and Gillian Daniel and generously supported by the National Arts Council and Falcon Media.
9. Happy House
Curated by Tulika Ahuja (MAMA Magnet) & Cats on Crack
Featured Artist: New World Plaza (SG), Rin Tachihara (SG), Joy Song (SG), State.land (SG), Amanda Tan (Empyreal; SG), Izzad Radzali Shah (SG), Clarrot (SG), Ashley Erianah (SG)
State.land, Smile Like Nobody's Watching, 2021, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
Is there happiness in pursuing happiness today? Presented and produced by MAMA MAGNET and The Council, the exhibition seeks new perspectives by combining creative output from emerging artists as well as the community. The site-specific experience directs attention towards each participant’s agency, and includes an audio-visual participative installation created by Singapore born, internationally-acclaimed artists Reza Hasni and Kin Leonn.
Special Presentation
The Cup
by Mark Chua & Lam Li Shuen
Screening Times:
14 & 15 Jan (Fri & Sun), 5:30 PM
Film Still from The Cup (2020) Mark Chua & Lam Li Shuen.
In a surreal tableau, a man with a brewing machine for a head, discontent with the bland taste of the brew from his own body, attempts to do what he can to improve its flavour. Made during the lockdown period in Singapore, The Cup is a meditation on being in the world, upon the flattening out of life as we know and image it during the pandemic.
Lockdowns and restrictions in daily life due to the pandemic seem to have brought to surface in many, a dissatisfaction with simply being, in this more isolated way. The work explores the notion that perhaps what felt missing during the lockdown - where satisfaction and a ‘more joyous life’ lie in - was the freedoms to individually curate and have the choice of risking our lives how we see fit, in various engagements, something we had in life before the pandemic. Perhaps we felt such a joy of life when death, its elusion and risking it was in a way of our choice, in which arises the inexplicable tangle of the living we want, and how we live.
The Cup was recently awarded First Prize (Moving Image) at the Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize in 2021
Related Digital Experience
Hawker! Hawker!
Set in the historic location of Lau Pa Sat, Hawker! Hawker! brings together Singapore- and New York-based artists, curators, and writers to shine a timely spotlight on Singapore’s evolving hawker culture.
The 13 collaborators in Hawker! Hawker! bring rich approaches and diverse intercultural perspectives from across international borders and disciplines (including participatory installation, sculpture, photography, performance, digital art, and writing) to delve into the then and now of Singapore’s multifaceted hawker culture, as well as to imagine the future of this cherished “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” (UNESCO, December 2020).
From traversing thematic dimensions of our personal and collective stories to exploring dialogues surrounding community and the environment, Hawker! Hawker! will harness the transformative power of the arts to engage audiences in considering a more sensitive awareness of the issues around food in public spaces, as well as our rituals, histories, and relations with the players within.
Check out Hawker! Hawker!'s programmes here.
HORIZONS
by so-far x Metis Art x AORA
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Stimulating the senses and connecting with the present, HORIZONS is an opportunity to travel the world in 24 hours and engage with limitless forward-thinking visions. Tuning in with global experts across art, business, technology, creative ventures, wellness and more, the journey is interactive, collaborative and nurturing. Dial in to a studio visit, embark on a culinary exchange, accompany an artist on a walking tour of their city, tune into a meditation — HORIZONS is a collection of meaningful and memorable physical meet digital moments from around the globe.
This 24-hour virtual programme — commissioned by the National Arts Council in partnership with so-far, AORA and Metis Art — allows for a long-haul trip from Singapore to Guatemala, Istanbul to Dhaka, Seoul to London, and beyond. HORIZONS widens our sense of latitude — emotional, social and geographical — and furthers horizontal, collaborative, sensual and interdisciplinary crossovers.
If Forests Talk 2022
Curated by Kent Chan
Image Credits: Humic Moods by Weixin Chong
Exploring how new digital modes of research, communication and presentation might allow for the bridging of distances and the intimating of proximities. And perhaps more importantly, how a place such as Singapore - birthed for the facilitation of globalisation – might continue to be seen. If Forests Talk 2022 (IFT22) is the second edition of the SAW 2021 online project (https://ifforeststalk.com) that homes in on the tropical rainforests of Singapore, placing its focus upon the early histories of the disciplines of botany and natural history.
The early methodologies of these disciplines were often practised by the West remotely from their subjects, relying upon the study of specimens and literature instead of fieldwork. With the continued disruption to global travel, IFT22 explores the parallels between the current modes of grounded/remote artmaking and these past disciplinary practices.
Exploring how new digital modes of research, communication and presentation might allow for the bridging of distances and the intimating of proximities. And perhaps more importantly, how a place such as Singapore - birthed for the facilitation of globalisation – might continue to be seen and imagined from both within and out in this current moment of rootedness.d imagined from both within and out in this new moment of rootedness
–
For more digital experience, you can also visit our digital microsite at: artweek.sg/saw-digital
For more Digital Experience like this, do check our SAW Digital microsite at: artweek.sg/digital
Screening Schedule
Art Series: 17 Jan (Mon) & 20 Jan (Thur), Timing Varies
Digital Artworks: 14 – 16 Jan (Fri – Sun), 23 – 30 Jan (Sun – Sun), 5:30 PM
Special Presentation: 14 – 16 Jan (Fri – Sun) , ), 5:00 PM
All timings stated here are in Dubai time (GMT +4).
Art Series
1. Pretty Exciting Stuff
by National Arts Council
Screening Times:
17 Jan (Mon), 5:30 PM
Pretty Exciting Stuff is a video series featuring 12 conversations between everyday Singaporeans and talented artists. Get to know them and understand their practice across a diverse range of media like sculpture, photography and watercolour.
Artist List: Ong Kim Seng & Karina | Zen Teh & Rita | ila & Miranda | Victor Tan & Sabriel | Milenko Prvacki & Clarity | Ashley Yeo & Perry | Barry Yeow & Jack | Zulkhairi Zulkiflee & Kavita | Stephaine Jane Burt & Ain | ZERO (Zul Othman) & Yong Siang | Nature Shankar & Lim Ziyu | Debbie Ding & Mehboob Shah
2. Rewritten
by National Arts Council
Screening Times:
To be confirmed
“Rewritten” presents 14 text-based public artworks by Singapore artists, contemplating the multitude of changes – from the minute of the tremendous – experienced in our daily lives since the onset of COVID-19.
The artworks were distributed across eight parks spanning east to west – Ang Mo Kio Park, Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park, Jurong Lake Gardens, Lorong Halus Bridge, Lower Seletar Park, Luxus Hills Park, Punggol Waterway Park, Sengkang Riverside Park – resembling visual poetry unfurling across the island, awaiting discovery.
Featured Artist: Robert Zhao, Ang Song Nian, Seah Sze Yunn, Regina De Rozario, Justin Loke, Dawn Ng, Weimin Lai, Yasira Yusoff, Jerome Ng, Zed Hann, Adeline Loo, Cheong Yew Mun, Hun Ming Kwang, Hunny and Lummy, Hanson Ho, Cheryl Chiw, Namiko Chan Takahashi, Aaron Lee, Sam Lo, Petrina Dawn Tan, James Tan
3. State of the Arts: Shubigi Rao & Robert Zhao
by The Institutum
as part of State of the Arts
Screening Times:
State of the Arts: Shubigi Rao - 17 Jan (Mon), 6:30 PM
State of the Arts: Robert Zhao - 20 Jan (Thur), 6 PM
Robert Zhao. Photo courtesy of The Institutum.
State of the Arts delves into an artist’s practice through the medium of short video interviews. This series of video interviews allow artists to share a glimpse into their practice, lives and philosophies. The studio visit interviews are conducted by leading Singaporean and Southeast Asian artists and curators. The videos will be available on SAW Digital, as well as the Institutum’s website and YouTube channel.
Featured Artist (All): Robert Zhao (SG), anGie Seah (SG), Amanda Heng (SG), Chen Yanyun (SG), Pio Abad (PHL/LDN)
Digital Art Works
Screening Times:
14 – 16 Jan (Fri – Sun), 23 Jan (Fri - Sun), 5:30 PM
(in chronological order)
1. What you don't know, you won't miss
by Adeline Kueh
as part of Somewhere in Bedok blooms the blushing rouge of embroided roses
What you don't know, you wont miss (2022) Adeline Kueh.
Stepping into Johann’s studio, one is transported into another space in time - like time travel. Drawing reference from a literary text and art history, Proust’s and Monet’s madeleine preoccupations felt apt for this exhibition as they represent an extension into my research practice about intimate labour and care, and kueh-kueh making. The space also always makes me reflect on our own complex positioning and entanglements with Euro-American colonial expansion and histories. As an intervention, “What you don’t know, you won’t miss” brings together the embodied ritual of preparing food.
Here, they manifest specifically in the processes of baking via an ASMR video, denial of access to the actual madeleines but more significantly, the foregrounding of the cycle and elements of life in the tropics that come into play with the madeleines: the butterfly pea plant and powder, humidity, contamination, pollution, mould and decay become this uncanny mix in this minimal installation within the decadence of this space somewhere in Bedok.
2. XxHaven_KitchenxX
by Nelly Tan & Farizi Noorfauzi
as part of Fated Love Sky
XxHaven_KitchenX (2022) Nelly Tan & Farizi Noorfauzi.
XxHaven_KitchenxX attempts to unpack negative affects ascribed to ‘bad’ cooking in light of privileging naïve or nonsensical forms of knowledge practice. Exploring overlooked ingredients and re-imagining their importance in cooking, the work turns toward happy and productive failures in the process of recipe-making – forming yet another supper club-art collaborative encouragement.
3. Approximities
by Nina Djekić
as part of If Forest Talks 2021
Approximities (2021) Nina Djekić.
Approximities presents us with a series of seemingly everyday vignettes. However, as the characters move in and out of the frame, the scenes increasingly gain an air of artifice.
The film builds on my experiences visiting a local park while living in Singapore. Spending long stretches of time at the park without a particular aim in mind, it has allowed my thoughts to roam freely and gently, amidst the company of strangers. One by one, alongside the scenery and vegetation, these strangers became a familiar presence.
Reconstituting this familiar park space through my memories, I engaged with a group of friends in a long-distance choreography of enacting and translation. This process is a paradoxical task of establishing common ground within an artificially constructed situation.
Can we think of a park as a virtual space or vice versa, that enables us to gather regardless of physical distance? How do we rearticulate proximity under those conditions?
How do we spend time?
4. earth, land, sky and sea as palimpset
by Zarina Muhammad & Zachary Chan
as part of If Forest Talks 2021
Film Still from earth, land, sky and sea as palimpset (2021) Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan.
eath, land, sky and sea as palimpset by Zarina Muhammad and Zachary Chan are invitations and invocations to see with skin, hear with our feet, feel our way through spatial interruptions and somatically attend to sound at points of transit, change and threshold-crossing.
Each cumulative form of this long-term project is an invitation to reframe hegemonic cartographies, to conjure the ecologies of selves within the seen and unseen, and make memory maps from meandering through the homely and strange, the uninhabitable, the chthonic, the otherworlds and more than human worlds that we share habits and habitats with.
5. Proximities
by Zulkhairi Zulkiflee
as part of Proximities
Image Credit: Zulkhairi Zulkiflee, Proximities.
Proximities is the first solo exhibition by Singaporean artist-curator Zulkhairi Zulkiflee. This debut exhibition at Objectifs focuses on a new video work surrounding Malay masculinities and their plural representation.
At the beginning of 2020, artist-curator Zulkhairi Zulkiflee focused on the trope of the Malay Boy found in the works of Singaporean artist Cheong Soo Pieng. An indirect extension that included a visual study of colonial postcards depicting the implicit relationship of boy and crocodile, and personal photographs of his father in the eighties, Zulkhairi's consistent interest in images and visuality is rigorously anchored by the Malay male body. Here, his works circulate key themes like representation, racialized masculinities, and Malay male identity formations. In the many Malay boy(s) of Cheong’s multiple yet elusive renditions, Zulkhairi attempts to locate the Malay male in art history while unpacking underlying systems of power that have shaped and naturalized understanding of difference. When exorcised from the framings of art history - one informed by overlapping lenses of pioneer artists and their Western predecessors, the Malay boy now stands as a figure (re)molded by contemporary currents and various intercessors.
Against such discourses, the exhibition primarily focuses on a video that foregrounds Malay masculinities and their plural representations — intersecting wide-ranging sources from art history to personal meditations.
6. Somewhere in Bedok blooms the blushing rouge of embroided roses: Walkthrough
Bedok Coast, Marjorie Dogget (1957). National Archives of Singapore, THE NEST STUDIO.
Somewhere in Bedok blooms the blushing rouge of embroidered roses is a show staged in a HDB apartment, somewhere in Bedok. The space assumes the aesthetics and function of a living museum, having been decorated in Rococo and Georgian styles. From the gilded furnishings to the sculpted curves of the fixtures, to the collection of art and ornamental objects, including paintings, turn-of-the-century Chinoiserie and antique English and European porcelain, the mood is one of high visual drama. Its theatricality calls out to be deconstructed, and the exhibition explores the themes of domesticity and the uncanny in response to the material lushness of its environs. The Freudian uncanny embodies the tensions between what is familiar and comfortable and, conversely, what is concealed or erased - the un-familiar, or un-homely.
7. This Is My Brain on Demand
by Mark Chua (SG) & Lam Li Shuen (SG)
as part of It's My Party and I'll Cry If I Want to, You Would Cry Too If It Happened to You
)Film Still from This Is My Brain on Demand (2022) Mark Chua & Li Shuen.
This Is My Brain On Demand is a conversation with the spirit of the Singaporean ideal. The local ethos, according to the artists, is an almost ineffable idealization of certain ways of life - often utilitarian value systems and states of relations that seem to run through both the personal and the collective. The work is an installation comprising a coin-operated crocodile ride and a television monitor, centered on a moving image sequence depicting crocodilian characters basking at a swimming pool. Exploring the anxieties emerging from difference and otherness, the short film is a psychedelic, expressive attempt to wrestle the individual into coexistence with the Singaporean ideal, visually foregrounding the vividness found in films such as Shuji Terayama’s “Pastoral: To Die In The Country” (1974) and Derek Jarman’s “Jubilee” (1978).
8. NOT FOR SALE
Curated by Kristine Tan & Gillian Daniel
Featured Artist: Debbie Ding (SG), Chong Yan Chuah (MY), Yeyoon Avis Ann (KR)
You Press The Button (2022) Debbie Ding. Courtesy of the artist.
NOT FOR SALE is an artwork commission that invites three artists – Debbie Ding, Chong Yan Chuah and Yeyoon Avis Ann – to create new site-specific speculative video works that co-opt the language of advertising in order to interrogate our entrenchment within a state of advanced capitalism exacerbated by digital technology.
Advertisements can be read as cultural artefacts as they both mould and mirror a society’s desires and ideals, hopes and fears. Unlocking this potential, the artists interrogate the current state of affairs, to pave the way forward for alternative futures. Utilising the language and format of traditional advertising, these videos will play on a five-storey digital billboard outside Fortune Centre and a new billboard at Kinex Mall during Singapore Art Week 2022.
NOT FOR SALE is curated by Kristine Tan and Gillian Daniel and generously supported by the National Arts Council and Falcon Media.
9. Happy House
Curated by Tulika Ahuja (MAMA Magnet) & Cats on Crack
Featured Artist: New World Plaza (SG), Rin Tachihara (SG), Joy Song (SG), State.land (SG), Amanda Tan (Empyreal; SG), Izzad Radzali Shah (SG), Clarrot (SG), Ashley Erianah (SG)
State.land, Smile Like Nobody's Watching, 2021, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
Is there happiness in pursuing happiness today? Presented and produced by MAMA MAGNET and The Council, the exhibition seeks new perspectives by combining creative output from emerging artists as well as the community. The site-specific experience directs attention towards each participant’s agency, and includes an audio-visual participative installation created by Singapore born, internationally-acclaimed artists Reza Hasni and Kin Leonn.
Special Presentation
The Cup
by Mark Chua & Lam Li Shuen
Screening Times:
14 & 15 Jan (Fri & Sun), 5:30 PM
Film Still from The Cup (2020) Mark Chua & Lam Li Shuen.
In a surreal tableau, a man with a brewing machine for a head, discontent with the bland taste of the brew from his own body, attempts to do what he can to improve its flavour. Made during the lockdown period in Singapore, The Cup is a meditation on being in the world, upon the flattening out of life as we know and image it during the pandemic.
Lockdowns and restrictions in daily life due to the pandemic seem to have brought to surface in many, a dissatisfaction with simply being, in this more isolated way. The work explores the notion that perhaps what felt missing during the lockdown - where satisfaction and a ‘more joyous life’ lie in - was the freedoms to individually curate and have the choice of risking our lives how we see fit, in various engagements, something we had in life before the pandemic. Perhaps we felt such a joy of life when death, its elusion and risking it was in a way of our choice, in which arises the inexplicable tangle of the living we want, and how we live.
The Cup was recently awarded First Prize (Moving Image) at the Julius Baer Next Generation Art Prize in 2021
Related Digital Experience
Hawker! Hawker!
Set in the historic location of Lau Pa Sat, Hawker! Hawker! brings together Singapore- and New York-based artists, curators, and writers to shine a timely spotlight on Singapore’s evolving hawker culture.
The 13 collaborators in Hawker! Hawker! bring rich approaches and diverse intercultural perspectives from across international borders and disciplines (including participatory installation, sculpture, photography, performance, digital art, and writing) to delve into the then and now of Singapore’s multifaceted hawker culture, as well as to imagine the future of this cherished “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.” (UNESCO, December 2020).
From traversing thematic dimensions of our personal and collective stories to exploring dialogues surrounding community and the environment, Hawker! Hawker! will harness the transformative power of the arts to engage audiences in considering a more sensitive awareness of the issues around food in public spaces, as well as our rituals, histories, and relations with the players within.
Check out Hawker! Hawker!'s programmes here.
HORIZONS
by so-far x Metis Art x AORA
Stimulating the senses and connecting with the present, HORIZONS is an opportunity to travel the world in 24 hours and engage with limitless forward-thinking visions. Tuning in with global experts across art, business, technology, creative ventures, wellness and more, the journey is interactive, collaborative and nurturing. Dial in to a studio visit, embark on a culinary exchange, accompany an artist on a walking tour of their city, tune into a meditation — HORIZONS is a collection of meaningful and memorable physical meet digital moments from around the globe.
This 24-hour virtual programme — commissioned by the National Arts Council in partnership with so-far, AORA and Metis Art — allows for a long-haul trip from Singapore to Guatemala, Istanbul to Dhaka, Seoul to London, and beyond. HORIZONS widens our sense of latitude — emotional, social and geographical — and furthers horizontal, collaborative, sensual and interdisciplinary crossovers.
If Forests Talk 2022
Curated by Kent Chan
Image Credits: Humic Moods by Weixin Chong
Exploring how new digital modes of research, communication and presentation might allow for the bridging of distances and the intimating of proximities. And perhaps more importantly, how a place such as Singapore - birthed for the facilitation of globalisation – might continue to be seen. If Forests Talk 2022 (IFT22) is the second edition of the SAW 2021 online project (https://ifforeststalk.com) that homes in on the tropical rainforests of Singapore, placing its focus upon the early histories of the disciplines of botany and natural history.
The early methodologies of these disciplines were often practised by the West remotely from their subjects, relying upon the study of specimens and literature instead of fieldwork. With the continued disruption to global travel, IFT22 explores the parallels between the current modes of grounded/remote artmaking and these past disciplinary practices.
Exploring how new digital modes of research, communication and presentation might allow for the bridging of distances and the intimating of proximities. And perhaps more importantly, how a place such as Singapore - birthed for the facilitation of globalisation – might continue to be seen and imagined from both within and out in this current moment of rootedness.d imagined from both within and out in this new moment of rootedness
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For more digital experience, you can also visit our digital microsite at: artweek.sg/saw-digital
