Reel experience

Surfacing the Other

By May Ee Wong

20th Italian Film Festival (3 - 18 June 2009)

Some of the films I had caught in the previous years’ Italian Film Festivals had been powerful in exploring the subtle intricacies of emotions and  underlying tensions in relationships, and the opening film of this year’s Italian Film Festival, The Girl by the Lake (La ragazza del lago), did not disappoint.

... read more

Turbulence

Interview with artist Natacha Arena

By Emily Hoe

14th - 24th August, The Substation Gallery

Just a year after her last show at The Substation, called ‘The State of Things’, Magdalena Neuzilova and Emily J Hoe speak to Natacha about her upcoming exhibition, ‘Turbulence’, a collection of large, almost abstract, paintings that often suggest parts of the human body.

... read more

Solo show by Marcel Antonio

An Tales of Tales beyond the Surface

7th - 24th August, Galerie Joaquin Singapore

Marcel Antonio’s new works are rich with references drawn from a vast sphere of knowledge and layered with insights culled from a life of deep introspection.
Antonio is one of the Philippines art scene’s brightest stars, having begun his professional career before turning 20, while still a student as the University of the Philippines’ College of Fine Arts.

... read more

Imagining and seeing

The Art of Fernando Suarez

By Usha Nathan



Fascination with move-ment has a long history inside of sculptural practice, notably in the work of Auguste Rodin whose sculptures are some of the most intense studies of the human body in the rapture of movement. Speaking of the difference between art and photograpy in one of his conversations with a fellow sculptor Paul Gsell, Rodin once remarked about how art captures the “gradual unfolding of gesture” without reproducing a position in mid-air that appears frozen in time 1. While looking at the works of Spanish sculptor Fernando Suarez, it seemed as though they had come very close to illustrating this particular remark of Rodin.

... read more

Texts and Symbols

Social Commentaries through Public Installations

By Syed Muhd Hafiz



For the past few months, two imposing ‘social sculptures’, by two Indonesian artists, struck me for making their presence felt, in a rather colourful and playful manner,: Aramaiani’s I LOVE YOU (Social Sculpture after Joseph Beuys) at the Esplanade Concourse and S. Teddy Darmawan’s Love Tank installation at the National Museum of Singapore (NAMOS) 1.

... read more

A Cut of Wood

Seeing and being seen

By Christina Chua



Contemporary art is often peppered with ‘appropriation’. Here, it grabs at the past and what litter remains of it, distributing its products among galleries.  Fortunately, the somewhat simplistic and dreary proceedings of junk art (in more ways than one) are not the theme of Lucy Davis’ solo exhibition at Post Museum.

... read more

You and your character

By Richard Chua



After watching the plays this year at Short and Sweet Singapore, I said to myself, we need more humanity on the stage. This festival is no doubt a wonderful platform for new playwrights, directors and actors to showcase their skills.

... read more

The Museum of Islamic Art

Doha, Qatar

By Syed Muhd Hafiz

Our recent knowledge of the Middle East has been tinged with stories of oppression and violence that have been, to a large extent, manipulated by the Western media. With coverage that tends to single out certain preconceived stereotypes of the region, large segments of their cultural aspects have been ignored. More than a region that has been blessed with oil revenue, the Middle East is made up of diverse cultures.

... read more

Singapore Arts Festival 2009

By Kiran Kumar



Amidst works that are stringently prescriptive and those that offer inert entertainment, this year's Singapore Arts Festival brought to town some good dance.

... read more

Book As Artform (VI)

By Eriko Hirashima

The Altered Book is one technique used in book making. Cut, pasted, painted, drawn, and collaged from existing books, they are transformed into new, different (book) works. Unique books are also categorised with these sometimes. Probably the most well-known and representative altered book is Tom Philips' A Humument.

... read more

When you see nothing

By Rofan Teo

The two shows, coinciding with the Singapore Arts Festival, Found and Lost at the Osage Gallery and TransportAsia at the Singapore Art Museum, are misleadingly dissimilar. Going by the title alone, Found and Lost, is likely to convey the sense of perpetuating a lost exposition or a revelation that is bound for obscurity. TransportAsia, on the other hand, has an accent of a product label or a company, translating into high speed travels.

... read more

Proverbial in(ter)ventions

Ratnadeep Gopal Adivrekar

By Gillian Nelson

A clever title is something of a double-edged sword - on the one hand it can indicate a show that will knock your socks off; on the other it may simply highlight a preference for provocative text above the artwork itself. One exhibition with such a clever title was at the National University of Singapore (NUS) Museum recently, and i leave it to anyone who saw the show to make up their own minds as to which category it fell into. 

... read more

Lasts/Change

NAFA Design & Media Graduate Show, 19 - 27 June

By Dominic Fonde

The 2009 Graduate Show for design and media at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts has an accompanying blurb:

 “36 students will be featured underlining the fact that change is inevitable and lasts is a delusional concept. The ephemeral is not to be dreaded from, but to be regarded and celebrated”.

... read more

Artist Speak

Lightness of finding and losing through drawing

By Lim Kok Boon

“‘Found & Lost’1  features the works of eight Singaporean artists concerned with questions of representation in relation to the act of drawing. Curated by Guo-Liang Tan, the exhibition serves as an extension of the ideas explored in ‘Aversions’, a drawing publication project in which the artists explore and respond to the boundaries of drawing within their own artistic practices, delving into issues such as peripheral vision, perpetual delay, the impossibility of the image, and the fragmentation of language and memory in relation to the act of drawing.” (Extracted from exhibition press release)

... read more