The Singapore biennale, which since its fourth edition has tried to stamp its own character on the global map of biennales, is now in its current fifth edition and it is reminiscing over the past through contemporary art in Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. 

It is not only reflective, but also fascinating and revealing while evoking a sense of deep contemplation and artistic exploration. 

A new biennale vision seems to be emerging, with a higher than usual number of female artists participating (24 of the total of 60 artists involved) and a new collaboration with the Benesse Art Prize established at the Venice Biennale in 1995.

Entitled “The Atlas of Mirrors”, 58 art works made with various mediums are clustered around nine subthemes and presented in seven venues.

The venues are the Singapore Art Museum (SAM) and 8Q at SAM, the Asian Civilisations Museum, the de Suantio Gallery at Singapore Management University, the National Museum of Singapore, Stamford Green, the Old Parliament House and the Peranakan Museum.

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Surely, the cooperation with Benesse this year is a strong indication of the increasing interest in the region’s developing art and the shortlisting of five artists for the Benesse Art Prize, including Indonesia’s Ade Darmawan’s, adds reason to rejoice.

Ade’s commissioned work entitled Singapore Human Resources Instituteappears like a director’s office, but is actually an imagined space consisting of objects, paintings and prints once found in offices and domestic environments in Singapore and Indonesia. It serves as a memory archive of parallel mini histories that commemorate the institute’s achievements.

Through history or the anticipated future, the biennale and its selected artists and art works try to link the countries of Southeast Asia with South and East Asia, giving insights into the culture of unity in diversity.

One such example comes with a work by Indonesian artist Eddy Susanto, whose in-depth research once pointed at the similarity between the liberating spirit that entered Europe with the Renaissance and Islam’s arrival on the island of Java. 

His work in this Singapore Biennale, The Journey of Panji, reveals the dominating role of Java in uniting the countries of ASEAN through the stories of the legendary Prince Panji, which spread from the 14th century Kediri in East Java to its neighboring countries, becoming a sort of lingua franca in the region. 

Eddy’s installation in the biennale features a huge canvas on which the figures are shaped with original script starting with local Javanese, then flowing out to the regions where this narrative traveled. Letters from the original languages spill from the canvas to flow over to ultimately touch a book, Wangbang Wideya by SO Robson, containing a collection of the stories printed with Latin characters, which was only published in the last century.

In this age of selfies when we want  to see our faces mirrored as interestingly as possible and in the best possible position, Melati Suryodarmo’s dramatic three-hour-long performance Behind the Light is a sobering suggestion that our fine looks in the mirror may in fact be masks for our not-so-nice insides. 

Melati does so using two mirrors, one of which is placed at the back of the first mirror. In repetitive alternatives, visitors entering the space first see their own image reflected in the broad mirror. In fact, Melati stands right at the back of this mirror, but remains unseen until the light switches off and the audience’s faces make way for Melati facing a red bench. 

Slowly bowing onto the rice paper on the bench, she imprints her besmeared face onto the white rice paper, which she then holds up to show an ugly, almost eerie image. Then the light switches on, returning to us our everyday faces.

The ghost of colonial power continues to haunt the present time. For leading artist Titarubi the bloody wars with the Western powers, the Dutch VOC, the Portuguese and the British, who strived to impose authority over the trade in simple nutmeg from the Indonesian Spice Islands that had become a most favored luxury in the West, has been an overpowering theme for her art works. 

Bloodshed, the extinction of the people of Bandaneira, the burning of ships off the north coast of Java, the brutal colonization of the Indonesian islands and the trampling on human rights have remained a haunting memory that has informed her art works. 

For the Singapore Biennale, she has crafted Aceh, Madurese and Banten ships out of burned wood, the images of which she only recently found on maps from Spain. 

Looming high on the charred ships are empty cloaks made of gold-plated nutmeg that rose from simple nutmeg to become the most lucrative commodity in the world. 

Although Tita’s title, History Repeats Itself, is open-ended, visitors in the know could imagine the Indonesian maritime affairs minister looking for the foreign ships that were stealing fish in Indonesian waters and sinking them when she caught them, somehow turning the tables of history.

(Read also: Must-see artworks at National Gallery Singapore)

As well, Balinese artist Made Wianta’s Treasure Islands made of raw buffalo leather, mirrors and nails also harks back to the Spice Islands, namely that of Rhun in Maluku, which the Dutch exchanged for New York (then known as New Amsterdam), while another Balinese artist, Made Djirna, presents a personal cosmology mapping his personal imaginings about skala (scale) andniskala (abstract). 

Meanwhile, Agan Harahap’s picture narrative reworks archival photographs to remind us of a community of descendants of freed slaves, the Mardijkers, found in major cities in the East Indies. 

The above described works are Indonesia-specific, answering the biennale’s crucial question: “From where we are, how do we picture the world and ourselves?”  

The other regions bear similar imprints and while our cultures may differ in one way or another and the materials used are different, their stories also intertwine together in various ways.

Artistically reworked maps denoting cultural diversity abound, but it is Pala Pothupitiye from Sri Lanka who excels in re-crafting the official version of maps to tell a different story as he overlays, juxtaposes and transforms portraits of voyages, landscapes and mythical figures with his own personal history.  

Some outstanding works denote the exceptional development of scientific renderings in art, such as Ni You You’s Atlas, Dust and Invisible Force (from China) that use thousands of industrial magnets to represent the invisible force of gravity between celestial bodies.

Pannaphan Yodmanee of Thailand’s Buddhist cosmology and modern science has led her to consider the concepts of change, loss, devastation and Armageddon; the existential in Han Sai Por of Singapore’s Black Forest, a hauntingly barren field of charcoal logs; a memory of sorts in Htein Lin of Myanmar’s installation of soap blocks in which little human figures are carved, which is a metaphor representing his incarceration; Home and a Home by Bui Cong Khan of Vietnam and Rathin Barman of India works with preservative carvings and architectural structure.

India’s Adeela Suleman’s series called Dead of Not Night are decorative stylized paintings on found ceramic plates that are replete with imagery of violence and the memory of violence.  

Singapore’s ever-developing sound artist, Zulkifle Mahmod, uses 146 wok lids in combination with technological advances for his imaginative and fascinating sound sculpture SONICreflection — an immersive and impressive work of sounds denoting a pluralistic stance amidst Singapore’s multiple ethnic groups and races forming its urban culture. 

Wrapping up most elements found in the aforementioned works is Marine Ky of Cambodia, whose exquisite installation Setting off (a commissioned work) at the Peranakan Museum resonates well with the character of the museum, but above all renders for us a view of the culture that marked the region as it did her when the Khmer coup forced her to migrate to foreign lands at the age of 4 years. 

What looks like a tree of life, the six-meter-high structure traces the history of pattern making and her personal history through time and space, incorporating examples of Peranakan lace and embroidery patterns obtained from Cambodia, China, Hong Kong and Korea, while she imprints, etches and prints them over Khmer motifs using intaglio printing and Khmer engraving techniques.  

For this work she has been commuting between Cork, Ireland, where she makes her prints and her textile studio in Phnom Penh, as well as her storage places in Battambang and Singapore.

_________________________

Singapore Biennale 2016 

was commissioned by the National Council of Singapore and organized by the Singapore Art Museum. It runs until Feb. 26, 2017.

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