Overview: 'Singapore- State of Contemporary' 2013 (original) (raw)
Related papers
'Practising Contemporary Art in the Global City for the Arts, Singapore'
In Performance Paradigm: A Journal of Performance and Contemporary Culture, no. 8 (August 2012), special issue on ‘Practising Contemporary Art in the Global City for the Arts, Singapore’, guest ed. C. J. W.-L. Wee (internet journal; see http://www.performanceparadigm.net/category/journal/issue-8/), 2012
Performance Art In Context: A Singaporean Perspective
Since its appearance in Singapore, the practice of performance artposed various questions. Why would artists feel motivated to work in atemporal art form, which does not result in the making of a material artobject? Given the temporal and ephemeral nature of performance art howdoes it continue to be represented? For those who had not seen the actualperformances presented in the past how can one continue to discuss therelevance and contexts of those performances today? Should the temporalephemeral works be preserved?My research will attempt as much as possible to follow an academicformat and research based on published materials. However, it is anendeavor embarked upon with the foreknowledge that there are very fewcomprehensive, analytical texts on contemporary art of Singapore andespecially in regard to performance art. My thesis therefore will alsodepend on personal interviews and interactions with the practicingperformance artists as well as based on my own personal work andexperience as a practicing artist.From this research we may reclaim performance art and its position asa valid fine art form in relation to more traditional media. It will alsointerrogate possibilities for future actions and directions to develop mywork in performance art and its contribution to contemporary art discourse.
2016
Beginning as a project to protect and advance personal dreams in artistic pursuits, the Floating Projects Collective (FPC, 「句點」, 2010) has evolved from a group of 4 into a collective with 20 additional members in 2015, and its activities renamed Floating Projects (FP「據點。句點」, literally “occupation point”). FP takes on a spatial turn by occupying an 1800-square-foot industrial unit in a fading industrial district, Wong Chuk Hang (WCH黃竹坑), on the southern part of Hong Kong Island, where the increase of disused and vacant flats forces their owners to open up to atypical manufacturing usage. The spatial turn has fueled our imagination and soon evolves into a series of experiments around a central question: what can we artists do with an empty unit in an industrial building with institutionally and physically defined constraints? How does what we do connect to the premise that art is by definition a form of radical thinking, thus an indispensable force in nourishing our humanness? At the point when FP inserted itself into WCH, the district was already the home for several commercial galleries in addition to two new boutique hotels on top of various independent art spaces and artist’s studios. The rent FP is now paying could have been 30% less a year earlier. The question of art is the question of space in a milieu when art and design are heavily appropriated to be the supporting pillars of what is known as “creative economy,” an aggressive agent for gentrification, the flip side of which reads the problematic transformation of urban surfaces. FP is not only an experiment, but it seeks to be experimental, in the sense that it strives to re-open up many known normal artistic practices to assert questions of art must be understood also as those of non-artistic nature. Issues of how to keep making art, and of how to scramble for resources to sustain survival, become a new series of questions. Can artists working with different artistic media work together, and how about artists of different generations and expertise training? Who is the artist – only those who received formal studio art education in an art school? Are there modes to publish and share art other than the white cube model? How does a collective accommodate individual aspirations and desires? What possible modes of survival and sustainability are there beyond the commercial versus charity support binary structure? Rooted in Critical Theory concerns, FP’s production of space (Lefebvre) is considered the impetus for the reproduction of social relations. FP asks: how do we sustain the progressive posture of art, preserve art’s non-conforming and implicitly anti-establishment character in the age of gentrification, when art increasingly becomes a decoration, or a kind of added value? These questions all point to the need to re-imagine and re-invent a different sort of creative economy, called “the space of creativity.” (Hui Yuk, DOXA) At this point, FP is answering to the demand of a relevant model – one that (re-)generates singularity (of the individuals) and promotes new collectivity, or the enactment of co-individuation. (Simondon, Stiegler) What does it mean to be an artist in a hyper-capitalist digital age in which our feelings and temporal being are the main targets of moderation and control through broad-scale commodification of art and design (Lukács, Stiegler) in the name of urban progress through gentrification (Hui)? As many government-initiated local projects highlight heritage re-enlivening and/or are implicitly imbued with a social work concern or rhetoric, what does FP as a collective conceive to be the new relations between the politics of art, de-proletarianization (the regaining of one’s place in knowing and in producing new knowledge), and the practice of love and care? In the short period of seven months, a few signature event series have emerged to be place-holders of individual desires and the practice of care for others. The conference presentation (and the full essay) will elaborate on how our purposes are realized in the following programs – WCH Assemblage (on re-purposing dumped material into art installation and object performance), Work-in-progress Inspection, Spatial Pressure Calibration (improvised sound-making), Floating Teatime (an on-line writing platform), and other free contribution from FPC members specific to their talents -- all occurring on an open-to-all indoor space furnished with a charity café with a free wi-fi reading environment to encourage person-to-person conversations, and a growing library and digital archive to promote the culture of documentation as many of us are media artists. FP is not just an organization, but itself an art project that interrogates questions of space and being. Re-orientation of art is central to the re-orientation of everyday life, which must begin with spatial re-orientation.
2021
and Sculpture in Kumasi. In a conversation with curator Jelle Bouwhuis, seid' ou contextualized his transition from the making of the "work of art" to a probing of the "art of work, " his focus on pedagogical practice, and some of its political implications regarding his vision of a sharing community: Working in the "cultural slum" of KNUST College of Art in Kumasi, my institutional critical response was to go on artistic strike, stop "making art" symbolically and to inaugurate a practice of "making artists. " My political strategy was what I called "ironic overidentification" with the conditions of the cultural slum. Through that, I hoped to transform art from the status of commodity to gift (seid' ou and Bouwhuis 2019: 193; cf. seid' ou and Bouwhuis 2014: 111-13). KUMASI'S EMANCIPATORY CURRICULUM: ITS PLACE IN GHANA'S EXHIBITION CULTURES The Emancipatory Art Teaching Project proposed and introduced a curriculum with an egalitarian drive-an art-focused curriculum that is not prejudicial to any medium, form, style, genre, process, or trend. Above all, each artist was trained as both artist and exhibition-maker, and as neither. Students were encouraged to rethink the exhibition form itself as a format of art-making and to expand its space, scope, and political ambitions beyond its contemporary framing (seid' ou 2015). Among other things, this was a response to a noticeable dearth of curatorial sensibility in the typical artist's training and experience in Ghana. Through complex modes of exhibition conception, making, and dissemination, the new Kumasi curriculum silently reconfigured art-based and art-focused labor (cognitive, technical, physical) in the hope of a radical transformation of local art institutions and communities. Through seid' ou's Drawing Class and his collaborations with colleagues, a series of artist-curated guerrilla exhibitions ensued between 2003 and 2015 (seid' ou 2006, 2010). These interventions bypassed the gallery system and transformed city spaces and everyday situations into magnificent exhibition sites and community projects (seid' ou 2010; Woets 2011: 323; Dieckvoss 2017) 2. Continuously for more than a decade, an average of fifty concurrent solo exhibitions and public interventions, curated by a corresponding blaxTARLINES Exposing Something to Someone While Exposing Someone to Something blaxTARLINES Exhibition Cultures There-Then-And-Hereafter kąrî'kạchä seid'ou, George Ampratwum (Buma), Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu (Castro),
Great Expectations: What Does it Mean to Make and Hold Space for the Arts in Singapore?
Space, Spaces and Spacing 2020: The Substation Conference, 2020
The arts and artists need space to thrive. However, as much of the land in Singapore is state-owned, providing space for the arts—literally and figuratively—remains challenging. Today, there is a rich variety of arts infrastructure in Singapore, including performing arts venues, state-subsidised artist studios and co-working spaces for freelancers. However, this state- administered infrastructure comes with expectations, as these arts spaces have been positioned as expedient policy resources capable of achieving a broad confluence of cultural, urban, economic and social outcomes for Singapore. These “great expectations” on state-initiated arts spaces and the ensuing implications are the foci of this paper. I will use two case studies to question what it truly means to make space, hold space and lose space in the arts in Singapore. In doing so, I will explore the possibilities of practices of community, solidarity and collectivism in the arts in Singapore. The paper will highlight the limitations of mere physical space provision, by focusing on the practices of commoning and forms of solidarity that inhabit artistic practice and arise from coming together.
The Exhibition as an 'Urban Thing'
2015
This paper presents and discusses the design of a retrospective exhibition of the work of Metis, shown at the Arkitektskolen, Aarhus, Denmark between 10 October and 14 November 2014 and at Edinburgh College of Art between 27 March and 6 April 2015. Making reference to Bruno Latour's distinction between 'objects' and 'things', as developed in his influential article 'Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?', it speculates on what it would mean to conceptualise an exhibition as a 'thing' – that is, as a gathering of relations – and how this might affect our approach to it. In the case of the Metis exhibition, which was titled 'On the Surface', this issue is related to the agency of the large-scale textile drawing that covered the floor of the gallery, forming a kind of raft within it upon which visitors walked. Acting as a gathering space for both exhibits and visitors, the drawing was constituted through a complex of representational modalities, which put the seven exhibited projects into play with one another in such a way as to resist their stablisation and resolution into a sequence of objects.
Making Space. Singapore, Artists & Art in the Public Realm
The Journal of Public Space, 5, 2020
In recent times Singaporean artists have undertaken audacious artistic performances, actions and interventions in public space, highlighting the role of artists as provocateurs of debates around public space and their engagement with issues related to ethical urbanism. Between 2010-2020 artists working in diverse fields of artistic practice including visual art, street art, performance art, community arts and new genre public art begun to locate their artwork in public spaces, reaching new audiences whilst forging new conversations about access, inclusion and foregrounding issues around spatial justice. In contesting public space, artists have centralized citizens in a collective discourse around building and shaping the nation. The essay documents key projects, artists and organisations undertaking artistic responses in everyday places and examines the possibility of public art in expanding concepts of 'the public' through actions in Singapore's public space, and demonstrating the role of artists in civil society.