Singapore Art Week brings over 150 events to the island from 19 to 28 January. From Ho Tzu Nyen's mid-career survey at Singapore Art Museum to an inquiry into Afro-Asian diasporic synergies organised by The Institutum, below, we share five exhibitions to see.
Passages
NTU CCA Singapore, Block 38 Malan Road
28 November 2023–28 January 2024
Expect: multimedia works by three artists from Southeast Asia, influenced by their residencies in European cultural institutions.
As part of a residency programme developed by NTU CCA Singapore and supported by the European Union, artists Priyageetha Dia, Ngoc Nau, and Saroot Supasuthivech respectively undertook summer residencies at Jan van Eyck Academie (Netherlands), Rupert (Lithuania), and Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Germany). In this exhibition, the artists present new multimedia works, made upon their return to Asia, that draw from their specific cross-cultural experiences.
Extending her interest in Southeast Asia's colonial and plantation histories, Dia rendered archival images from a rubber planting company, sourced from the archives of Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, into a four-channel sound installation titled Sap Sonic (2023), which brings to life the unspoken narratives of plantation workers.
Ngoc Nau's new video Virtual Reverie: Echoes of a Forgotten Utopia (2023) juxtaposes elements of post-Soviet architecture and realities of Lithuania and her native Vietnam. The video foregrounds the artist's digitally rendered version of the Vietnam-Soviet Friendship Palace of Culture and Labour in Hanoi as a stage for a symbolic journey through time.
Saroot Supasuthivech's multimedia installation Spirit-forward in G Major (2023) tells the stories of Thai expatriates in Germany. Following the cycle of life, death, and rebirth, the narrative transforms and conveys the artist's primary research, such as his interviews with Thai monks and nuns in Berlin.
