OBJECTIFS ENAMEL PIN
Take home a memento of Objectifs in the form of this enamel pin, featuring our iconic Chapel Gallery and main building, which houses our Lower Gallery, Workshop Space, and retail space! Rendered in a classic, minimalist design, the pin is now available in an elegant shade of antique brass.
Your purchase plays a vital part in enabling us to continue presenting high quality programmes that are available to all.
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An Appendix of Sorts Poster by HOKO
An eclectic and fragmented selection of research ephemera from the physical archives of Atelier HOKO featuring notes/images collected or created in the process of researching and producing Science of the Secondary Volume 1-10.
Produced as a supplementary to Science of the Secondary by Atelier HOKO.
About Atelier HOKO
Atelier HOKO (2002) is an independent research lab that focuses on the study of the growing disengagement between people, things and space. The atelier hopes to cultivate in people, an open-ness and ability to un-know, bringing about a heightened curiosity towards all phenomena by taking a fresh look at reality. Founded by Alvin Ho and Clara Koh.
CHAT WITH ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE: SEE KIAN WEE
Earlier this year, visual artist See Kian Wee spent a month in Hanoi, Vietnam as part of Objectifs’ reciprocal arts residency programme with independent photography space Matca.
Objectifs spoke with Kian Wee …
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OVERFLOW from Shashasha books
Takuma Nakahira is one of the most legendary photographers of post-war Japan and a life-long rival of Daido Moriyama. Overflow is the first photobook in which his installation work comes alive in entirety and detail since its unveiling in 1974.
Takuma Nakahira’s series ‘Overflow’ was originally presented as an installation during the 1974 exhibition ’Fifteen Photographers Today’ (National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo). The work consisted of 48 color photographs that were arranged on a wall 6 meters wide and 1.6 meters high. The photobook Overflow is the first chance to view Nakahira’s astonishing series outside the context of an exhibition.
The photographs show elements of a city — eery rifts in a space overflowing with objects, commodities and information — that Nakahira encountered and captured in his everyday life, from ivy creeping across walls and manhole covers in the streets to the tire of a large truck, from a pale-bellied shark floating in the transparent darkness behind the glass of an aquarium to close-up shots of a subway station.
The photobook’s layout strictly mimics each photo’s position in the installation piece in order to replicate the series’ original experience within the confines of a book. Additionally, Princeton University assistant professor Franz K. Prichard contributes an extensive essay in which he compares the Overflow series with Nakahira’s vision of an ‘illustrated dictionary’ (as outlined in Nakahira’s 1973 essay ‘Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?’), thereby offering a deep exploration of Takuma Nakahira, who integrated praxis and theory in his work like no one else.
‘Overflow compels us as viewers to see the interplay of a seemingly random distribution of fragments, surfaces and residues. And in so doing, we are made to sense the undifferentiated enumeration of parts of an incomplete whole. This is, if you recall, the definition of the “illustrated dictionary” form that Nakahira provided in the essay “Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?”’
— from Franz K. Prichard’s essay
Exactly Foundation – The Hour Before She Sleeps by Mindy Tan
As the day unwinds and her make-up is removed, she is not superwoman at this point. Mindy Tan, in her Exactly residency, The Hour Before She Sleeps, records four women of Singapore’s third wave in their private lives, drawing from the intimacy of the last hours of the day. Entering this space is a search for the visual identity of a Singapore woman, a space that digs beneath the Singaporean methodology of surveys, statistics and charts, to access behind the door, the real, and the ordinary, for an alternative understanding. As policies and opportunities surrounding each generation of women change, drawing further departure from “the woman my mother was”, what roles should a woman in her 30s / 40s play? How does tradition affect her modernity? How is the Singapore woman unique from the rest of the world?
The keynote essay is a poem Women, in waves by Amanda Chong who is a lawyer trained in Cambridge and Harvard and writes poems during lunch breaks. Her first collection, Professions, was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018. Her poetry has been engraved on the Marina Bay Helix Bridge and included in the Cambridge International GCSE syllabus. She is interested in exploring themes of gender and power in her writing which has appeared in Monocle, the Harvard Journal of Law and Gender, The Straits Times and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. She co-founded ReadAble, a non-profit organisation that runs literacy programmes for children and migrant women in a low income community.
About Mindy Tan
Mindy Tan is a Singapore-based documentary photographer who captures people in their everyday lives. She began her career in 2004 as a newspaper journalist after graduating with double degrees in theatre, sociology and graphic design. At The New Paper, she covered breaking news, migrant labour and youth community issues. She also wrote a nightlife and soccer column. After Mindy won the Society of Publishers Asia Award for Excellence in Human Rights Reporting in 2007, she turned professional as a documentary photographer. While photographing countless events, publishing and staging her exhibits internationally, Mindy is also a Fujifilm Global Ambassador under the X-Photographer’s scheme.
About Exactly Foundation
Exactly Foundation is a not-for-profit, trademarked registered label established by Li Li Chung to commission photographers to create works that stimulate discussion of social concerns in Singapore. Its goal is to produce new knowledge by having viewers engage with the photographs and share them with friends and family over a 2-3 month period.
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Exactly Foundation – How She Loves by Charmaine Poh
How She Loves looks at the performativity of love and self through a series of portraits featuring female couples coming from a diverse range of backgrounds and presentations.
Participants are invited to a studio, where they are asked to engage with wedding backdrops, props and costumes: matrimonial tropes that have been an unmarked part of mainstream society. Projected onto the background are their parents’ wedding portraits, a pictorial representation of the heteronormative histories that have come before them, as well as the bearing of family on the manifestation of their queer lives. Drawing from ethnographic methods and theatre directing exercises, the process-driven work produces collaborative portraits that emphasise the participants’ chosen modes of self-representation. How She Loves is an attempt at uncovering the layers of the queer self, and the negotiation between reality and the imagination.
How She Loves is an attempt at uncovering the layers of the queer self, and the negotiation between reality and the imagination.
The keynote essay, Being and Relating – Reflections on the Photographs by Charmaine Poh, is written by Vivienne Wee, a feminist activist, anthropologist and public intellectual who works in Singapore and Indonesia. A founding member of the 34-year-old Association of Women for Action and Research (AWARE which champions women’s rights in Singapore), she is currently AWARE’s Senior Advisor and leads on evidence-based advocacy for accountability of decision-makers. She is also a Director at Ethnographica and an Associate Lecturer at the Singapore University of Social Science. She is also active in the Jakarta-based Institute for Women’s empowerment. Vivienne obtained her PhD in Anthropology from the Australian National University, MSocSc in Sociology from the National University of Singapore, and Bachelor’s degrees in Music and Anthropology from the University of Minnesota.
About Charmaine Poh
Charmaine Poh is a Chinese-Singaporean artist, photographer, and writer based between Singapore and Berlin. Her practice combines photography with text, archival material, installation, and new media, focusing on issues of memory, gender, youth, and solitude in the Asian context. Often working with the form of narrative portraiture, she considers the performance of self and the layers of identity we build. She works with communities in a collaborative process that holds space for introspection, intimacy, and sharing. She is interested in the stories that make us who we are. Her work has been exhibited widely in Singapore and internationally. She graduated from Tufts University with a B.A. in International Relations, and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Visual and Media Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin.
About Exactly Foundation
Exactly Foundation is a not-for-profit, trademarked registered label established by Li Li Chung to commission photographers to create works that stimulate discussion of social concerns in Singapore. Its goal is to produce new knowledge by having viewers engage with the photographs and share them with friends and family over a 2-3 month period.
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Exactly Foundation – Plasticity by Ernest Goh
In physics, Plasticity describes the deformation of a material by an applied force. Since its first appearance in 1907, synthetic plastic has forced a permanent change in human cultures and commerce globally. We are all addicted to plastic and the great convenience it has brought us but along with that, plastic has also brought about catastrophic environmental pollution and potentially harmful effects on human health. To artist Ernest Goh, what he finds on Punggol beaches is plastic trash. What he wants us to fuss over is what we don’t see: the tiny microplastic bits that marine life mistake as food. Ernest zooms into the epic scale of plastic pollution via extreme close-up images of microplastic fragments some just 2-3mm in width but reproduced super-sized. The artist wants to emphasise that, ‘these fragments of plastic may be minuscule but their devastating impact on us in larger-than-life’.
Includes a keynote essay by Sarah Ichioka, entitled Picking Up the Pieces.
About Ernest Goh
As an art practitioner and visual artist in natural history and wildlife, Ernest Goh’s interest in plastic pollution was sparked by his realisation that the ocean’s marine life is the first stakeholder to be severely affected by plastic trash. This prompted the artist to investigate the complex relationship between animals, human and plastic via Ayer Ayer Project, an ecological -engaged art project that aims to inform and engage the public on the impact and severity of plastic pollution through participatory artworks. Ernest’s work was commissioned by and installed at the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum, Singapore, collected by the Multimedia Art Museum Moscow, and many also are in corporate, public and private collections. He is also the creative director of The Animal Book Co. which works with animal welfare groups through art and design.
About Exactly Foundation
Exactly Foundation is a not-for-profit, trademarked registered label established by Li Li Chung to commission photographers to create works that stimulate discussion of social concerns in Singapore. Its goal is to produce new knowledge by having viewers engage with the photographs and share them with friends and family over a 2-3 month period.
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Exactly Foundation – Writing on the Wall by Grace Baey
Gender reassignment is not common nor simple. In the long and often painful process, trans-men and -women endure awkward experiences daily. To get us all on a more respectful higher ground towards dialogue and acceptance, many struggle to figure out how to start such conversations and build understanding. Photographer-artist Grace Baey starts the ball rolling by incorporating conversations into the pictures, where trans individuals tell their own stories as part of the pictures. The process involved Grace and the participants having conversations about specific aspects of people’s stories that they wished to focus on for the project, making the pictures together, printing out the pictures, and having them write their responses and thoughts on the pictures.
Grace’s project is entitled Writing on the Wall, which alludes to personal thought and expression amidst societal boundaries and divisions. The metaphor of the wall often comes up in conversations and interactions amongst both the LGBTQ+ community and those from the conservative right. The wall can signify power, but it is also people’s coping and defence mechanisms when threatened.
Features a keynote essay by Audrey Yue, Professor of Media, Culture and Critical Theory, and Head of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. Her writings on LGBT Singapore include Queer Singapore: Illiberal Citizenship and Mediated Cultures (2012) (Hong Kong University Press, co-edited with J.Pow), “Trans-Singapore: Queer Asia as Method” in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (2017) and Notes Towards the Queer Asian City: Singapore and Hong Kong” in Urban Studies (2017, with H.H. Leung).
About Grace Baey
Grace Baey is a Singapore-based photographer with an interest in social issues. A human geographer by training, her work examines the relationship between place, identity and belonging. Over the past few years, her projects have focused on social issues faced by transgender people in Southeast Asia and Singapore.
About Exactly Foundation
Exactly Foundation is a not-for-profit, trademarked registered label established by Li Li Chung to commission photographers to create works that stimulate discussion of social concerns in Singapore. Its goal is to produce new knowledge by having viewers engage with the photographs and share them with friends and family over a 2-3 month period.
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Portrait of Home Postcard Set
Collect this set of five postcards featuring stunning black and white images from Portrait of Home, an exhibition presented by Objectifs that showcases the work of Singaporean photographer Mr Lim Kwong Ling (b.1932). The works in this show depict different facets of home through the photographer’s eyes, from landscapes, to various occupations and industries of the time, to family photos.
Mr Lim has been an active member of the photographic community in Singapore, leading and promoting exchanges between photographers from Singapore, China, and Southeast Asia. He is one of the founders of the Photo-Art Association of Singapore and has also led the Federation of Asia Photographic Art (FAPA) Conference in Singapore. Mr Lim himself has exhibited at the Singapore Empress Place Museum and the Cultural Palace of Nationalities, Beijing, to high acclaim. Many of his works are also permanently archived in the Singapore National Gallery.
Prints from this exhibition are also available for sale at our physical and online stores.
A book featuring the works of Mr Lim will be launching at Objectifs next year. Email us at info@objectifs.com.sg to be added to the waitlist.
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