Arts Picks: Video game installation at SAM, Jeremy Tiang on translation, local plein air paintings

Hito Steyerl: Factory Of The Sun

At Gallery 2 of the Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark is this landmark work Factory Of The Sun by acclaimed German video artist and film-maker Hito Steyerl, which immerses visitors in a not-so-alternate reality where people are forced to dance to produce light.

First presented at the Venice Biennale in 2015, the 20-minute video is a dark satire of how the virtual has bled into the real world in the digital age.

It takes to extremes the fact that every movement, whether glancing at a phone screen that triggers advertising algorithms or an online purchase, can be and has been harnessed for corporate profit.

The multilingual sequence contains documentary footage and made-up news coverage inserted seamlessly into a surreal video game.

Visitors are invited to draw up a deck chair in the luminous matrix of the gallery, and challenged to try to tell the real and the simulated apart.

For instance, is the player who is shot by a drone part of gameplay or an event that has prompted demonstrations in the real world? What are the Singapore riots of 2018? And is participation in the game voluntary?

In this work, Steyerl is inspired by her studio assistant’s brother, whose viral homemade YouTube dance videos were used as a model for Japanese anime characters.

It becomes obvious that what started out as a fun hobby has become stifling. The dancer is covered head to toe in latex, and play becomes breathless work in a motion-capture studio.

As the surtitles remind viewers: You do not play the game, the game plays you.

Where: Gallery 2, Singapore Art Museum at Tanjong Pagar Distripark, 01-02 Tanjong Pagar Distripark, 39 Keppel Road
MRT: Tanjong Pagar
When: Till Sept 24, 10am to 7pm
Admission: Free
Info:

str.sg/iJBa

Jeremy Tiang on translation

Singapore author Jeremy Tiang’s novel State Of Emergency (2017), which won the Singapore Literature Prize in 2018, has been translated into Chinese.

To mark Jinji Zhuangtai’s release, Tiang, along with translators Lim Woan Fei and Chen Si’an, will be speaking at the Singapore Press Holdings auditorium on Saturday.

They will share their thoughts on issues such as why translingual and transnational collaboration are important to the historical memories that the book tackles.

Told from multiple perspectives, the narrative unfolds against a backdrop of familiar moments in Singapore’s history, from the Hock Lee bus riots of 1955 to the long-drawn guerilla war of the Malayan Emergency between 1948 and 1960.

The bilingual panel is co-organised by local independent bookstore and publisher City Book Room and the Wan Boo Sow Research Centre for Chinese Culture of the National University of Singapore.

Where: Singapore Press Holdings Auditorium, News Centre, 1000 Toa Payoh North
MRT: Braddell
When: Saturday, 7 to 8.30pm
Admission: Free; register at

www.gevme.com/stateofemergency

Info: 

www.gevme.com/stateofemergency

Jalan Jalan

Confluence Art Space invites visitors to go for a walk at its latest exhibition of three second-generation Singapore artists.

Painted en plein air, or outdoors, the 16 works depict scenes from Singapore’s Parliament House to flower shops in Myanmar to a temple in Kathmandu, Nepal.

The late co-founder of the Equator Art Society and social-realist painter Lee Boon Wang is represented by five paintings; watercolourist Ong Kim Seng contributes three; while impressionist Tan Choh Tee, also known as Matisse of the East, has eight, helping viewers to better understand his passion for painting outdoors.

Where: Confluence Art Space, 02-29 Havelock 2, 2 Havelock Road
MRT: Chinatown/Clarke Quay
When: Saturday to June 18
Admission: Free
Info: 

facebook.com/confluenceartspace