National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum come together with local artists and curators in two new shows to support the art community

Two new shows opening at National Gallery Singapore on 4 September will see the local visual arts community come together in a show of solidarity with one another, and with the community at large. The two exhibitions, An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season by National Gallery Singapore, and Time Passes by Singapore Art Museum, are helmed by independent curators, and spotlight established and emerging local contemporary artists and their work.

The exhibitions are part of Proposals for Novel Ways of Being, an unprecedented initiative by the two museums in partnership with 10 other local art institutions, independent art spaces and art collectives. The large-scale collaboration features the works of over 170 artists in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and they offer the public inspiration in moving forward in a changed world. Gallery visitors will experience diverse art works that draw them into poetic meditations on the present state of affairs in society and invite them to explore notions of caretaking and time in a world altered by the pandemic.

An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season by guest curator Syaheedah Iskandar features the works of 10 young Singapore-based artists, while Time Passes is helmed by guest curator Samantha Yap and comprises works by 13 artists, 12 of whom are based locally. The two exhibitions mark significant firsts – many of the artists featured will be making their debut at the Gallery; the independent curators helming the exhibitions will also be presenting shows at the Gallery for the first time. These collaborations speak to the spirit of Proposals for Novel Ways of Being, which aims to support the local art community and provide artists and cultural workers with a prominent platform to showcase their work during a time of need.

CONTEMPLATING NOVEL WAYS OF BEING IN A GLITCH SEASON

An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season offers immersive mixed-media installations, performances and site-specific artistic interventions that encourage visitors to collectively reflect on and imagine new ways of thinking and doing towards a more humane future.

Tini Aliman’s Pokoknya: Organic Cancellation, an aural performance translated into sculpture, explores plant consciousness and interspecies communication, inviting visitors to contemplate our fraught relationship with nature; while Kin Chui’s Station 13010 engages visitors in discussions of spirituality through an installation where microscopic organisms such as fungi and algae are worshipped as deities in a dystopian future.

Visitors are encouraged to re-evaluate our habit of mass consumption in Clara Lim’s 3 GHz, a mixed-media installation that comments on society’s worship of technological progress and its tendency to discard things instead of repairing or recycling them. Multi-disciplinary artist Ila’s There can be no touching here is an ongoing project that reflects on how we consume and disseminate information on assault. It explores existing and new pathways for action, actively addressing and reducing instances of harm, especially in the face of structural inefficiencies and weaknesses during a time of crisis. This project is co-curated with Samantha Yap as part of both exhibitions.

The curator of An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season, Syaheedah Iskandar, says, “For a long time, art has always been part of the process of introspection, acting as a medium to ask the harder questions about the present state of things. With the pandemic, the role of art has never been more crucial. From proposing new paths of action, to giving agency to other worlds to exist alongside ours, to subverting the everyday with humour; the works presented in An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season mirror the many undercurrents that the world is grappling with. Following these exercises of contemplations, I hope visitors are inspired to propose new ways of thinking and doing – of being – in a changed world.”

NOVEL EXPERIENCES OF TIME AND CARE DURING A PANDEMIC 

Time Passes is conceived as a corridor of time that reflects on the passage of our days as we navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from the middle chapter of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse, which captures a movement in time that bridges the narrative’s past and future. The works presented in the exhibition, most of which are new commissions or adaptations of existing works, touch on modes of caring, living and relating, especially in a time that begets difficulties and uncertainties.

Featuring works across diverse media such as paper, rattan, assemblage, soil, paint, video and photography, visitors are invited to reflect on how our social bonds and acts of care have persisted through the pandemic. Victor Paul Brang Tun’s Frame(works) is a series of rattan sculptures made by deconstructing an unused rattan chair. His processes consider how care and compromise become mutually entwined in the creation of new forms and possibilities. In #sgbyecentennial, Fazleen Karlan draws on archaeological processes to explore the indeterminate passage of time and presents a visual record of our present through the unearthing of familiar everyday objects layered with soil and time.

Diana Rahim’s Interventions documents intimate ways of reimagining hostile architectural features in shared spaces across Singapore, while Divaagar’s immersive installation, Render Tender, takes the form of a fictional reiki studio, exploring how intimacy can continue to be performed at a time of limited physical contact.

“My hope for the exhibition is that it offers thought on the possibilities of caring and continuing. Specifically, to suggest ways of carrying on rather than just progressively going forward. I see this exhibition as a commitment towards the project of survival across our different communities that considers how we may bear difficulty and ‘yet prepare to live again’, to borrow poet Anna Akhmatova’s words,” says Samantha Yap, curator for Time Passes.

MOVING FORWARD TOGETHER IN DIFFICULT TIMES

Dr. Eugene Tan, Director, National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum says, “As we strive to move forward together as a community in the new normal, there are many learnings to be gleaned from the changes brought about by the pandemic. The exhibitions presented by National Gallery Singapore and Singapore Art Museum offer diverse perspectives and approaches in processing our experiences of the pandemic, be it a greater consciousness of long-standing social issues that are now thrown into stark relief as a result of the crisis, or committing to acts of caretaking, as we return to public life and shared spaces following the lifting of lockdown restrictions. We hope visitors are inspired to make meaning out of their own experiences of the pandemic, imagine new possibilities of the future and foster stronger relationships with one another through the exhibitions and programmes presented as part of the Proposals for Novel Ways of Being initiative.”

Other exhibitions and programmes for Proposals for Novel Ways of Being will open between August 2020 and February 2021.

General admission (free for Singaporeans and PRs) applies for both An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season and Time Passes at National Gallery Singapore, from 4 September 2020 to 21 February 2021.

Visual assets can be downloaded via this link. For more information, please visit www.novelwaysofbeing.sg and refer to the following annexes available in the PDF copy of this release:

Annex A: List of artists and curator for An Exercise of Meaning in a Glitch Season
Annex B: List of artists and curator for Time Passes