It may be the week leading up to the Lunar New Year weekend, but amid the festivities and holiday mood, there is still a wide variety of arts events to attend to get your culture fix!
Love. Lies. Tricks by Performance Program at LASALLE College of the Arts, 13 – 14 Feb, 8pm
Director of MoonShadow Stories and renowned champion of storytelling-as-artform, Kamini Ramachandran, has been described as “Singapore’s most mesmerising storyteller.” We’re excited to see her present The Hidden at the Armenian Church in a few months, a work commissioned for Singapore International Festival of Arts. Meanwhile, Kamini teaches the art of storytelling at LASALLE College of the Arts. This week, we’ll be checking out her first-year students from the LASALLE Diploma in Performance perform enigmatic tales from Asian mythology. More information on ticketing can be found at the Facebook event page.
I Am by NUS Indian Instrumental Ensemble, Esplanade Recital Studio, 12 Feb 7:30pm
“I Am is an ode to the spirit of modern womanhood celebrating the women in our lives, their fighting spirit, and strength.”
Literature and Indian music dovetail on Monday evening as the NUS Indian Instrumental Ensemble perform songs that celebrate the women in our lives and in our society, woven in with poetry by influential Tamil poets such as Bharathiyar and Bharathidasan. For more information, visit the NUS Centre For The Arts website.
To Touch on Tension – A solo exhibition by Daniel Chong, Supernormal Gallery, until 16 Feb
Young independent art space Supernormal seeks to present works and projects that are unusual or experimental, through any and all mediums, including design, artistic practices, and the “in-betweens”. This week they present the first showcase from their ongoing open call series, with works by LASALLE Fine Arts graduate Daniel Chong. With an interest in the notion of tension through transcience, Chong’s work uses materiality and its connotative qualities to set up a situation that is defined by a sense of precariousness and the ephermal. Many of the works will change form through the week-long exhibition so we’re curious to experience how it may always be slightly different each and every day, with each and every encounter. Check out Supernormal’s Facebook event page for more information.
Passing Time: A Solo Exhibition by Lui Hock Seng, Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, until 11 March
There’s a quiet magic in unedited, monochrome street photography, and even in today’s digital era of photo manipulation and elaborate filters, its simple and serendipitous charm endures. So we’re going to Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film this week to see Passing Time, which presents a fascinating series of pictorial photography from Singapore in the 1960s to 1970s, by 81-year old self-taught photographer Lui Hock Seng, offering viewers a glimpse into fragments of the quotidian in the early years of modern-day Singapore. The subject of his work ranges widely, from portraits, architecture, industry and streetscapes. A car mechanic by profession, Mr Lui ardently pursued photography as a hobby for decades, becoming a member of the now-defunct Southeast Asia Photographic Society, winning several awards, and even being made an Associate of The Royal Photographic Society (ARPS) of Great Britain in 1963.
Read more about the exhibition and the photographer on Objectifs.
Be Longing: Performance by Sara Tan & Yejin Kwon, Objectifs Centre for Photography and Film, 14 Feb 7.30pm
After visiting the photography Passing Time at the Lower Gallery at Objectifs, we’ll be heading over to the Chapel Gallery at 7.30pm on Valentine’s Day to catch a dance performance by Singaporean dancer Sara Tan and Korean dancer Yejin Kwon. The title Be Longing puns on “belonging”; while the latter connotes comfort, familiarity and ‘home’, the spacing in title renders a sense of alienation, distance and discontent. This work deals with stories about the displacement of individuals, people who have found themselves in a nomadic position, living in countries where they were not born into, struggling to still find a sense of stability, or belonging: it’s a highly pertinent narrative in today’s world. For more information on the performance and ticketing, visit the Peatix event page.
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