The 7th Singapore Biennale: Natasha from Singapore

理耕

2023-02-11 10:32:00

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The 7th Singapore Biennale is uniquely given the anthropomorphic name "Natasha". This is the innocent heroine of Tolstoy's famous book "War and Peace". The Biennale's curatorial team consists of four women art directors who have come together with different cultural backgrounds and academic expertise to seek innovation and change. They rejected the obscure themes of conventional large-scale exhibition projects, and used the lively and intimate image of "Natasha" to color the entire exhibition with the unique sensitivity, imagination and tenderness of women, bringing people emotional comfort.

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> Ranu Mukherjee, Ensemble for Non-Linear Time


The Biennale opens up spaces for visitors to stroll, rest and talk about exploration. The art leaves the museum and is scattered in 13 locations throughout the modern city of Singapore. "Natasha resists the spectacle of art-making, inviting the public to live with and connect to the work within a specific space and time. In doing so, the boundaries between art and life are broken down. In the heart of Singapore's city center, in the skyscraper Kellen Tower, a retail store has been transformed into an "unread library" now stocked with over 700 books. The project, initiated by Singaporean artist Heman Chong and Dutch artist Renée Staal in 2016, has toured the world. The "Unread Library" welcomes donations of unread books from all. In exchange, donors receive a lifetime membership to the library and can borrow books from the collection for free. The two founders deeply consider the library as an academic infrastructure and believe that it should contain as much content as possible that is not yet known to the general public. They also emphasized that access to knowledge should not be limited by capital, and that over-consumption of knowledge undermines people's right to equal access to knowledge. Thus, the Unread Library builds a redistributed pool of resources, where each book was once a private property but did not have its value at the time. The pool is a collection of books that have not been read for various reasons, and they are returned to the public domain as knowledge that can be accessed and shared by everyone. The books are displayed randomly in the library, even in stacks. Visitors feel at ease and at home, and they can organize and arrange the books according to their own preferences. The same kind of freedom given to the viewer can be seen in the public art "draw2play" by Yejin Cho, a Korean interactive designer. draw2play" is a large flat spray painting covering the fence of the main street in the neighborhood. There are more than ten geometric patterns to choose from, each with rules and instructions on how to play. The designer felt the lack of interaction between people under the strict control of the epidemic, so she conceived these street games to encourage people to invite each other to play and regain the joy of life.

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> Trevor Yeung,The Pavilion of Regret


"Natasha" carries the seeds of art out of the island of Singapore and across the fjord to the resort island of Sentosa, south of the island's coastline and even to the more remote outlying islands. This act is a reminder of Singapore's island identity that is easily overlooked. The mother and son artist duo from the Hawaiian Islands borrowed the local language "KĪPUKA" to echo "Natasha". "KĪPUKA" has multiple meanings, referring to the lava-encircled land in a volcanic landscape, but also to the cultural anthropology of a community cultural space that promotes the revival of Pacific Islander cultural traditions. In the exhibition, KĪPUKA is presented as a converted shipping container. Inside the container, the duo showcases the daily artistic expressions of different subjects in their interpersonal network of family, friends, and collaborators. Cultural materials related to the island fill the space, which resembles a temporary visitor center. Here, "KĪPUKA" is the best metaphor for the vitality and resilience of culture. The Biennale's focus on the island extends to a closeness to the earth beneath. Swedish artist Åsa Sonjasdotter has transferred his ritualistic potato-growing experiments to Singapore. Working with breeders, farmers and gardeners, the artist opens up research on potato cultivation and site-specific art installations. Potatoes are the most common crop and a staple food in the Andean region. By following the migratory trajectory of potato cultivation in Peru, the artist reflects on migratory flows, global food production, and the culinary culture passed down from generation to generation in the host communities. In contrast to the large scale of Osa's field experiments, Donghwan Kam of South Korea chose to place miniature fermentation chambers in the corners of the urban landscape. The daily experience and output of fermentation and cooking of Northeast Asian families is a gift of both time and nature. The fermentation room is shaped as a cute toy model house, placed directly on the ground, in which soybeans and other ingredients are fermented for an extended period of time. "Natasha" attracts visitors to accompany them on a journey around the island of Singapore. However, criticism followed. While the original intention of presenting contemporary art in unexpected places was good, some observers pointed out that the lack of an easy-to-understand introduction to the exhibit's content tended to keep the average visitor engrossed in the scenery. Moreover, the personalized naming of the exhibition sacrifices the framework of a focused discussion on a particular topic and blurs the curator's position, making it difficult to obtain a coherent interpretation of the works as a whole. "Natasha also attempts to reimagine the biennial's form of existence, but she does not do so as well as she could. The curatorial team did not radically decentralize as they did at Documenta in Kassel this year; they maintained the curatorial tradition of highly centralized decision-making.

图片> Donghwan Kam chose to place a miniature fermentation house in the corner of the cityscape


图片> The Library of Unread Books


Based on Singapore's geographical location and multi-ethnic background, the focus on the development of Southeast Asian art has always been a central concern of Singaporean researchers, and a genuine context for the Biennale project from its inception. The impressive mixed-media installation Hut Tep Soda Chan, in the collection of the Singapore Art Museum, was created by Tith Kanitha, an emerging artist living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, whose narrative mixes individual experience, collective memory, and elements of the country's unique culture. Taking its title from a 1968 Khmer film, Angel Hut is an installation of scenes of life made up of personal objects, everyday objects contributed by the artist's neighbors. This field of interwoven objects and stories bears witness to and records the economic and social changes of modern Cambodia. This year's curatorial team has repeatedly emphasized the need for the exhibition to transcend unfamiliar geographies, to break away from post-colonial discourse, and to ease the burden of Singapore's endorsement of the Southeast Asian region. The constraint of the curatorial approach has forced the curator's pioneering will to retreat into the realm of established practice. Elaine W. Ho's Time-based Art, Last Emporium, may be the answer to these questions. "Last Emporium" was originally the initial title of a monograph on Hong Kong culture, which explored the multi-dimensional impact of colonialism and the history of globalization on Hong Kong culture. Ho's art re-examines the discrete landscapes of the city in different times and spaces, inviting friends who met in their lives to discuss the social reality under their subjective judgments, leaving behind documents and letterheads. The project is a cross-linguistic nomadism and drift in a network of different cities, and it provides a series of portable material carriers of ideas for those interested in participating in the project to discover, carry, and exchange those fragments of information. Looking at the ambition of the Biennale's curators, they expect the exhibition to "change the way of seeing the world and activate the potential of changing perceptions", but we cannot help but question whether "Natasha" can truly achieve its goal only by adopting a critical approach that transcends existing paradigms. the goals of the curators? How can a nomadic, geographically detached "Singapore" Biennale live up to its name? Natasha, which is still in progress, is silent about this.

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> Zarina Muhammad, Moving Earth, Crossing Water, Eating Soil


Article Source:艺术与设计

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