Singapore Biennale 2019 - Works You Really Shouldn't Miss

With 77 artists and art collectives from Singapore, Southeast Asia and around the world, Singapore Biennale returns for its 6th edition from November 22, 2019, until March 22, 2020. Titled Every Step in the Right Direction, the international contemporary art exhibition invites participation through the act of artistic exploration, drawing on the importance of making choices and taking steps to consider current conditions and the human endeavor for change.

Singapore Biennale 2019 will showcase artworks across 11 venues in the city wherein the works converses with the site in which they are located. The place of their presentation becomes a central part of the making of their form and the response of their audience. Sites include: National Gallery of Singapore, Gillman Barracks, LASALLE College of the Arts, Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore Art Museum (Hoarding), Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay, SAM at 8Q (Hoarding), SMU de Suantio Gallery, National Museum of Singapore, National Library, Far East Plaza and W!LD RICE @ Funan.

Here is our selection of works you really shouldn't miss from this year's installment.

another diorama by Hu Yun

‘another diorama’ is a Coordinates Project presented by the artist Hu Yun that weaves his Biennale project around world-making in dioramas and the historic conjectures of woodcarving as a populist medium in the region. Housed in the Archaeology Library, this project is Hu Yun’s dialogue with the interstices of object and image as he inquires into the limits and possibilities of collaborating with the work of other artists. These works and archives are by émigré artists who practiced woodcarving in Singapore between the 1970s and the 1990s. ‘another diorama’ infers the historiography on everyday cosmology incarnated by woodcarving. Conversing with the sherds in the Archaeology Library, Hu Yun’s installation confronts the making and unmaking of motifs and materials among the trade and cultural life in the region.

22 November 2019 - 23 May 2020
Venue: National University of Singapore Museum

Artwork Activations & Performances – Amanda Heng

Amanda Heng invites participation and intimate conversations in her performative works. Often, she harnesses everyday situations to explore issues like the complexities of labour or the politics of gender. For her project in this Biennale, Heng revisits her ‘Let’s Walk’ series, first performed in 1999. Drawing upon the act of walking, the artist moves forward, looks back, turns inward and ventures outward with others. In this piece, she returns to the seminal scene of the walk and facilitates a workshop with people who chart their own routes of walking, and with whom she walks. In so doing, she generates reflections and perspectives, as well as comes to terms with the limits and stamina of the aging body.

30 November 2019  (7–10am)
28 December 2019  (7–10am)
29 February 2020    (7–10am)
21 March 2020    (7–10am)
Venue: Indian Heritage Centre (IHC)

Memento Stella and Inconsolable Ghost

The Projector is proud to collaborate once again with renowned video artist and filmmaker Takashi Makino in presenting his latest, most seminal work – Memento Stella.  

An epic, constellational visual masterpiece conceived as a reminder to ‘remember the stars,’ Makino explores the beginnings of all phenomena in the shapeless universal field of primary matter not too different from the birth of stars and planets in the vortexes of space dust. Through frame-rate manipulation, super-imposition and multiple exposures – sometimes with up to 200 layered images at once – underscored by an equally majestic soundtrack, Makino conjures a truly cosmic cinematic experience that will continue to reverberate with viewers long after they leave the cinema.  

Accompanying Memento Stella, is the ‘expanded cinema’ experience of Inconsolable Ghost – a multi-disciplinary live presentation featuring Dutch artist Gideon Kiers (computer, electronics), Berlin-based British artist Hilary Jeffery (trombone, electronics) and Takashi Makino (visuals, sounds). Conjuring up a 21st century vision of spiritism through the channelling of energies, atmospheres, ghosts, spirits, thought forms and other entities, Inconsolable Ghost is an occult transmutation of light, sound and film in the creation of supernatural cinema.

12 December 2019 - Inconsolable Ghost
13 December 2019 - Memento Stella
Venue: The Projector

Artist Insights – Nature Walk by Biennale Artist, Robert Zhao Renhui 

Led by Biennale artist Robert Zhao Renhui, a morning trek through the secondary forest of Queen’s Own Hill reveals the history of the Gillman Barracks area and its transformation from plantation to military barracks and finally, to present-day art enclave.

24 November 2019 10–11am
Venue: Gillman Barracks  

Read more about the Singapore Biennale 2019 here.