By Wei Leng Tay
DEC 2020-FEB 2021
PROGRESSIVE DISINTEGRATIONS/strong>
Chapel Gallery
In Progressive Disintegrations, artists Chua Chye Teck, Hilmi Johandi and Wei Leng Tay engage in conversation with Marc Gloede to create an installation of mixed-media works. These artworks, with beginnings in touristic images in Singapore from the late 1980s-90s, a family archive of photographic slides from the early 70s, and fluorescences of mould and wetness on wood, open up ways of re-looking at and thinking about what and who we live with, and how photographs inscribe ways of being.
Through photography, painting and installation, the exhibition addresses what is perceived through an image. It also asks how a photograph — as document, object and artefact — can be re-examined through a series of transformations, fragmentation and remaking.
© Ines Toa
OCT-NOV 2020
SHOOTING HOME YOUTH AWARDS CLASS OF 2019 EXHIBITION
Lower Gallery & Courtyard
Featuring works by the 11 photographers from Objectifs’ young photographers developmental programme. Includes Arielmegan Tan, Beverly Chew Xiu Qi, Toa Li Ting (Ines), Wong Cai Jie, J, Lee Jia Ying, Siew Png Sim, Suhani Gupta, Li Wanjie, Goh Lin Yuan, Nur Hadziqah and Kiat Tan Wei Jie. Mentored by Grace Baey, Joseph Nair, Juliana Tan and Nurul Huda Rashid.
AUG-OCT 2020
AN EDIFICE W/O
Lower Gallery
an edifice w/o spotlights two young artists — Dylan Chan and Rifqi Amirul Rosli, featuring all-new works in the mediums of photography, print and sculpture, curated by Kamiliah Bahdar. The exhibition title is taken from the preface of House of Incest by Anais Nin, which reads: All that I know is contained in this book written without witness, an edifice without dimension, a city hanging in the sky. The phrase captures something of the in-between — of things there yet formless, physical yet elusive, with edges soft and penetrable, real and imagined — that both artists contemplate in their works.
FEB-MAR 2020
LONGING AND BELONGING
Lower Gallery
To know Singapore is to know how its natural environment, precincts and iconic structures change before its people are ready to bid them goodbye. It is to recognise that change is the only constant in a tiny and ambitious nation. It is to feel a semblance of pride when gazing upon the latest attraction in town, while also feeling a pang of nostalgia for what was there before.
Singaporean photographer Wee Teck Hian has explored many corners of the island in more than two decades as a photographer specialising in panoramic black-and-white photography. He has documented many slices of Singapore’s history while working at a newspaper, and through his passion projects. Longing and Belonging presents his photographs documenting the transformation of various spaces in Singapore, including Marina Bay, the former Keretapi Tanah Melayu (KTM) railway tracks, and the Central Catchment Nature Reserve. The images explore what it means to belong to a community and country that is ever changing, and will resonate with anyone who has ever pondered the loss of something familiar.
Press coverage:
Business Times – Snapshots of Yesteryear
Singapore Art Gallery Guide – Longing and Belonging
JAN-FEB 2020
DANCING ALONE (DON’T LEAVE ME)
Chapel Gallery
Dancing Alone (Don’t Leave Me) by artist Susie Wong is an immersive video installation of solitary women dancing freely, evoking imagery of dance halls in the 1950s and 60s.
Referencing a line from the film The King and I — “No woman would dance alone while a man is looking at her.” — the exhibition alludes to the consumed representations of women in media that are re-enacted in the everyday. The dancers in Wong’s videos evoke both the desire to be freed from these tropes and at the same time to themselves consume by reinforcing them through the culturally infusive practices of a modern society. Through dance, she is both empowered and subjugated.
Includes panel discussion with curator Kimberly Shen and playwright Faith Ng, and Joget Malam: A Night of Dance and Spoken Word with Zai Tang’s music playlist mixed by Mr. Has (Telok Ayer Arts Club) and performances by Sharda Harrison and Sabrina Sng. Part of Singapore Art Week 2020.