SINGAPORE – Singapore Art Week (SAW) can often send visitors on a week-long frenzy ticking off international names as they waltz from big art fair to brand-name gallery.
But there is also value in charting an alternative path through community-based art and artist-run projects.
Amid the more than 130 events for the just-concluded art bash were some smaller works that engaged local communities and visitors in deeper fashion.
Insect Inventorium – a community arts initiative which brings together artists, entomologists and residents of Bukit Gombak – was born out of workshops where participants invented insects using natural materials.
Sixty of these made-up critters are on display at Bukit Gombak Park – with 10 species printed on large translucent sheets. Each is accompanied by a pseudo-scientific label, simulating a neighbourhood natural history museum. The public exhibition is on display until Jan 29.
Producer Hoo Kuan Cien, 41, who has also worked on community-based projects such as an audio-visual arts trail through Serangoon, says: “We often think of Singapore as a city-state to be quite uniform. But when you dig deeper, each neighbourhood has its own character.”
According to Hoo, ideas about art still revolve around traditional centres or exhibition spaces like museums: “We have a lot of art centres clustered around the city centre, but no neighbourhood arts centres.”
He adds that developing such centres could turn itinerant or one-off projects like Insect Inventorium into longer-term ones.
Although community-based art might still be criticised by some artists as “raw or not as polished”, Hoo says that interest in socially engaged community art has grown.
For artist Isabelle Desjeux, 55, the value of community-based work is in the surprising ways audiences own the art. She says: “When people are inspired by what they have seen and when they create something from it, that’s when you know the art is successful.”
Another SAW highlight, the nine-day Islands Time-Based Art (ITBA) Festival, celebrated transitory moments with its theme of Just In Time. It was curated by multidisciplinary artist Angie Seah, 44, who goes professionally by “anGie seah”.
The festival – which brings together disciplines such as performance art, sound art, dance and theatre – featured 29 performances in its second edition. Organisers said their 42 Waterloo Street venue attracted close to 1,200 audience members.
On the importance of an artist-initiated festival, Seah says: “Institutions have this misconception that performance art has to be controversial.” She adds that it is difficult for institutions to “commission performances that don’t have a lot of cultural context”.
The performances treated audiences to a vast range of time-based art. There is the daredevilry of corporeal artist Pat Toh’s impeccably choreographed Aqua Lung. The performer held the audience rapt, holding her breath underwater with a diver’s stamina.
Then there is the tenderness of mly mkn mly – a collaboration between visual artist Lina Adam and young artist Nur Surianita. The duo sit across each other in an absorbing silence, marinating a chicken in a ritual that foregrounds the labour behind food.
Seah says: “I wanted audiences to have a greater appreciation of live presentations by artists who are not on the mainstream.”
For her, it is not so much getting local audiences to understand the works as it is to “open their minds to the existence of such practices”.
And while a group of curious international curators visited ITBA, she maintains that her work remains committed to local artistic communities first. She says: “My objective is really for Singapore. There is so much work for us to do here, to promote (our art) and be accepted by institutions and audiences here.”
