Alex Foo reviews the exhibition The Tailors and the Mannequins, featuring works by Singaporean artist Chen Cheng Mei and Cambodian artist You Khin. The exhibition is part of Dalam Southeast Asia, National Gallery Singapore’s new space that presents perspectives from territorial Southeast Asia, aiming to spotlight lesser-known narratives in the region. Midway through the journey …
Let’s face it, 2021 in Singapore sucked harder than 2020. The waves of mildly inconvenient restrictions did more to chip away at everyone’s mental health than 2020’s “shut-everything-down” Circuit Breaker. Amidst the litany of changes to safe-distancing regulations though, the museums and galleries have remained open. Here’s my rundown of the highlights of Singapore’s museums, …
Where can we find each other? And where do we go from here? Happening on Saturday, January 23 2021, Festival Forum: Meeting-In-Progress discusses ideas, processes and ways forward in this new year of not-so-new normals. Both an agitation and undulation towards a common point of reference, Meeting-In-Progress is an attempt to gather everyone in a …
Festival Forum: Meeting-In-Progress at National Gallery Singapore Read More »
By Syed Muhammad Hafiz (1,823 words, 7-minute read) Recently I was asked by a friend, “How come I don’t see any local Malay artists in the current show at National Gallery Singapore (NGS)?”. My immediate response was, of course, that it simply wasn’t true. I was thrown off-guard, but then I started asking myself what …
By Nabilah Said (1,000 words, 6-minute read) My friends that have visited Singapore in recent times have been given the following non-food recommendations by me: I point them to Haw Par Villa for its wonderfully macabre dreamscapes of punitive Asian values, and then suggest they drop by National Gallery Singapore for the art contained within …
Staying woke: “Awakenings” at National Gallery Singapore Read More »
By Jocelyn Chng (440 words, three-minute read) Part of National Gallery Singapore’s special programme Performing Spaces that explores how space can be a “living organism” facilitating encounters between performers and audiences, Learning takes place over two weekends in March 2019. Learning is choreographed by Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard, co-founders of French dance company Le …
Art doesn’t have to be for the eyes only. As part of the Light To Night Festival 2019, National Gallery Singapore presents The Sensorial Trail, a series of artworks that draw on your other senses – those of smell, sound, and touch – in an intimate, sometimes playful exploration of intimacy with our various senses. …
By Nabilah Said (2,220 words, 11-minute read) Had Malaysian artist-poet Latiff Mohidin been French, he might perhaps strongly identify with the idea of the flâneur. Coined by French poet Charles Baudelaire, the French word for someone who strolls in the city found cachet as a description of the artist-poet who drew inspiration from the city …
Making Our Own Centres (Of) Ourselves: Latiff Mohidin’s “Pago Pago (1960-1969)” Read More »
Duration: 40 mins Podcast host Chan Sze-Wei leads a discussion on dance-making and dance programming for/in gallery spaces. Joining her are three guests: Vanini Belarmino, Assistant Director of Programmes at the National Gallery Singapore; Lim Chin Huat, cross-disciplinary artist and performance-maker whose recent dance work In Her Hands took place earlier this month at the …
THEATRE Southernmost: 1 Table 2 Chairs Project by Emergency Stairs, 12 – 24 December, The Arts House Presented by up-and-coming experimental theatre company Emergency Stairs, the first edition Southernmost is a theatre festival which brings the most outstanding and established traditional and contemporary theatre artists from the region together in this red dot for an intensive …
In what ways does an art institution inhabit the stone mausoleums of two former colonial structures; how can citizens take ownership of those immaculately preserved halls? Susan Sentler trained at the Martha Graham School in New York, danced with the Martha Graham Ensemble and is currently based in Singapore, teaching at LASALLE College of the …
Susan Sentler’s “Roof Response” to Danh Vō at National Gallery Singapore Read More »
By Eva Wong Nava (1390 words, 14-minute read) Pumpkins, phalli, polka dots, stainless steel balls. These are the iconographies of YAYOI KUSAMA (b. 1929), the influential Japanese artist, who is equally famous for her commission by Louis Vuitton to imprint her [in]famous dots on their emblematic handbags and clothing line. Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition at the …
YAYOI KUSAMA: Life is the Heart of the Rainbow, National Gallery Singapore Read More »
By Akanksha Raja (1500 words, 15-minute read) There is a distinctive break made between the modern, sans-serif typeface of the word “Artist” and the classical serif typeface of the word “Empire” in the title/publicity material of the National Gallery Singapore’s reinterpretation of the 2015 Tate Modern’s exhibition “Artist and Empire”. The typographical split signifies a …
Empire Strikes Back: “Artist and Empire: (En)countering Colonial Legacies” Read More »
