Excerpts from account number three, sheets 14 and 15 |
Oversight/Preclusion (work in progress)
Text, digital print on paper
Comprising 18 sheets
Each 21 x 29.7 cm
2015 (ongoing)
Installation view: Frac des Pays de la Loire, France, 2015
Having been unable to see Tan Pin Pin's film To Singapore, With Love nor to screen it in the context of an exhibition outside of Singapore, anonymous written accounts were sought and collected from people who have. This was facilitated through a framework asking contributors for 70 minutes of their time (the duration of the film) to recount the film in a chronologically linear manner, and also to provide personal thoughts about it. Taken as labour performed, payment was offered in exchange for this text, reimbursing the ticket price that contributors had themselves paid to see the film. A double mirroring occurs, memories and the voices of both the exiles in the documentary film and its viewer are transmitted, filtered, into text and print, across the border of the presumably invalidated image.
In September 2014, The film was banned from public screening in Singapore (classified by the Media Development Authority as "Not Allowed for All Ratings") on the grounds of "undermin[ing] national security because legitimate actions of the security agencies to protect the national security and stability of Singapore are presented in a distorted way as acts that victimised innocent individuals." This is an ongoing project, email if you have seen the film and would like to take part in writing an account. This text was compiled and published in book form in 2018. |
Text transcribed from above excerpts of account number three, sheets 14 and 15:Three
Seen at studio in Little India, Singapore, June 2014 It opens with char kway teow. Dissident 1 is stirfrying char kway teow in his home in the UK. At some point later we will see that Dissident 1 has a Vietnamese wife and they have a young boy. He was lonely, he says. I think he found his wife at an online foreign brides agency, something of the sort, and I mention it not as judgment—they do look happy—but just to note that it wasn’t happenstance, it was by design, by choice, and that perhaps when we have no more land to call home then we are compelled to make a person our home. There is a scene not far from this where Dissident 1 shows Pin Pin a shed, it appears to be a place he stores stuff he doesn’t quite need, and we see Pin Pin with her camera in the window, and this makes me think about the choice of aesthetic, or of a non-aestheticised aesthetic. In any case, Dissident 1 carts out the old leather suitcase he came to the UK with. ‘Came to’ makes it sound like a holiday. What does one call the final voyage of an exile from his homeland? I don’t seem to remember the names of any of the men, but I do remember the name of the woman, Ang Swee Chye, the wife of Dissident 2, who died in exile abroad without being able to return home to Singapore. I feel as if I have yet to understand proper this compulsion: maybe there isn’t enough love, or I am still wet behind the ears. She remembers Dissident 2 telling her that there was a real danger that he might soon be taken away. And she said—serious, dry—she remembers telling Dissident 2 then that if he was in danger of being taken away by them, why then they better get married, and soon. For the reason that she would be allowed to visit. I feel as if I learned something about pragmatism and romance, rolled into one. They—Ang Swee Chye and Dissident 2—did marry. They did take him away, two weeks later. He had spectacles. He was a lawyer. I think his name was Francis. Ang Swee Chye was a doctor, I think she was practicing in the UK as well as volunteering in Palestine after she was exiled. And she said something that shocked me to some degree, which was that she was sad, that it hurt her, that it was a pity, that she could not get a chance to diagnose/heal/operate on people of her own. Her fellow citizens. Singaporeans. There was the sense of, What was the point of being a doctor if she could not heal her own? I found this new. I remember thinking that I might never ever feel that way. That saving a Singaporean life surely must be the same as saving a British life or a Palestinian life, or am I wrong? Have I not yet extrapolated this in a way I can relate to? I couldn’t decide if that was a type of blinkered nationalism or purity of heart or even some form of calculativeness in spite of generosity. I think Ang Swee Chye also said that she felt solidarity with the Palestinians; that she could empathise with their struggle. And I think I wondered about her as a person, her character. What did it mean to feel sad that you couldn’t treat Singaporeans, whilst feeling solidarity for Palestinian struggle? I remember thinking that in some ways it was such a privilege for a person of a privileged class to be drawn to struggle. I am not at all belittling her work and her life and the good she has done in this world, but I remember that this was a thought that crossed my mind. I remember a dissident couple in Malaysia. The rest speak English, these two speak in Mandarin. They were part of the Malayan Communist Party, they’d lived in the jungle. They had pictures of themselves, young, in military dress, against foliage. They lived in a village and I think they made noodles for a living. They had a small TV set and a radio and a newspaper subscription to the Malaysian newspaper, and they said they still kept an eye and ear out for news on Singapore everyday. I found this—their loyalty, their vigilance, their inability to let go, and is there a measure of pride, or do I mistake some kind of vengeance as pride—quite heartbreaking. They still care. They have not let anything go, after all these years. It’s like [...] |