Notes from a Revolution (excerpts)
Watercolour on paper, archival inkjet print on paper
Installation dimensions variable
2012 — 2016 (ongoing)
Notes from a Revolution consists of an anonymous collection of images culled from print and digital media. They chart by proxy and through various frames fragmentary accounts of a Singapore wherein radical agency is emergent and in motion, coming up against dominant constructs that remain recognisably hegemonic and hostile. Open resistance through the tactics of civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action become demonstrated fact, backed in part by a functioning and organised political left, as well as the desperation of the transient, the displaced, and a generation seeing no future for itself.
The premise and images are fictional, a transposing of people’s movements and uprisings (and the varying registers of reciprocal militarist response) seen globally onto a sociopolitical landscape rendered barren by authoritarian rule. It is an attempt at recalibrating the imaginary and carving a space to contest notions of the possible, thinking through fear as mediated by schemas of surveillance and information control, nationalist exceptionalisms as externalised by the state and internalised by individual, as well as the implications that preserving a capitalist status quo carries into such a picture. |
Original exhibition text from August 2013:
"In a world gripped by crises and the spirit of insurrection, it would seem that Singapore had truly succeeded in becoming a paradise garden city, an insulated greenhouse eternally welcoming to financial investment and growth, problems continually and preemptively weeded out by incorruptible good governance.
How long can the narrative of exceptionalism stay (or keep us) afloat? This careening island of confabulations set to sail with riches in the cargo hold; guns trained both out and inwards. Its crew of docile consumers polices itself with the tools of competition, under the guise of freedom, with no recollection of resistance and oblivious to exploitation. What is a country, beyond the state and notions of the national? Can this or any country exist without espousing exception, exclusion, competition? What is the people of a country? What kind of a world can we, the people, imagine? How are they to be imagined? And what is the place of art in this?" |