July 29–October 22, 2017
1 McNally Street
Singapore 187940
Propositions for a Stage: 24 Frames of a Beautiful Heaven
Artists: Amanda Beech, Zach Blas, Uriel Orlow, Rabih Mroué and Ming Wong
Curated by Bridget Crone
Propositions for a Stage: 24 Frames of a Beautiful Heaven considers questions of performance and staging in relation to time through a range of projects that include works on paper, video installation, sculpture and sound. Taking their cue from dramaturgy and theater design, the individual works in Propositions for a Stage are presented within the space of the gallery as a series of discrete “worlds” that point to the tangled relationship between time, technology and the body.
Propositions for a Stage transforms the gallery into a constellation of micro-theaters. It explores the impact that theater practice has upon exhibition making, such as in Ming Wong’s installation The Bamboo Theater (2017), which dramatizes its construction utilizing the reveal–conceal conceit that lies at the heart of theater.
The exhibition demands that we consider the different possibilities for time beyond chronological or “clock” time. Works by Wong, Uriel Orlow and Rabih Mroué address the ways in which the past, present and future might be entangled, layered, disordered or projected onto one another. Similarly, Amanda Beech’s works on paper utilize advertising and pop imagery alongside references to gaming and computational form to question the relationship between time, cause and effect.
To enter into the space–time of the stage is to cross a threshold into a world apart, a place of speculation—a place to test the “real.” In Propositions for a Stage, this world is a place in which the limits of time and the body are investigated. Zach Blas’s series of videos and accompanying sculptures “Face Cages” (2014–16) show the body and its relationship to technology through a series of “endurance performances” in which the body is tested against its own biometric measurement.
Bridget Crone is a curator, writer and Lecturer in Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London.
Vertical Submarine: Chinese Illiterati
Chinese Illiterati is a new installation by art collective Vertical Submarine (founded Singapore, 2003) that explores conflicting notions of Chinese identity in literature, and intellectual and cultural theory.
The installation takes the form of an enormous Chinese handscroll laid across the floor of the gallery. On the scroll are Chinese translations of extracts from two texts: an English translation of a letter written in German by writer Franz Kafka to his fiancée Felice Bauer, and a footnote from The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and The World (1998) in English by historian and political scientist Benedict Anderson.
Written by a member of Vertical Submarine who is illiterate in Chinese, the handscroll raises issues of authenticity in relation to Chinese language and identity. It also explores concepts of “Chineseness,” and their origins in geopolitical conflicts, migration and diasporic communities.
Chinese Illiterati is part of Vertical Submarine’s ongoing research with curator Iola Lenzi on language, translation and identity, a project that began in 2014.
About the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) Singapore
The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) Singapore is the curatorial division of LASALLE College of the Arts, dedicated to supporting innovative and emerging art practices. Through an annual programme of interdisciplinary artistic and curatorial exhibitions and projects, it provides a dynamic site for contemporary culture in Southeast Asia.