In world focus: The DeutscheArt collection and Zaha Hadid

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sun, 09/24/2006 9:16 AM  |  Life

Carla Bianpoen, Contributor, Singapore

Corporate art collections are nothing new these days, but that a company started it 27 years ago is quite extraordinary. At that time, to bring art into the workplace was an act of breaking through conventional understanding of the working environment. ""It is quite a challenge,"" revealed director of Deutsche Bank Art Director Dr. Ariane Grigoteit at the launch of the anniversary show of the Deutsche Bank's collection in Singapore early this month.

Bringing to reality the vision that art can be an alternative form of currency, steady acquisitions by the Deutsche Bank have brought its collection to an impressive number of 50,000 works. The bank originally focused on art from German-speaking countries, but as its offices branched out around the world, its collection also increasingly moved away from its original focus. While art in the workplace became part of the bank's working environment worldwide, to seek new forms of communicating the art has become an integral part of the bank's collecting.

In this sense, commissioning the inventive Bangladesh born-London based Zaha Hadid to create ""new"" spaces for the anniversary traveling exhibition of the bank's art collection is another visionary move.

Zaha Hadid, the first woman to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, who designed the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati and has been commissioned to design the National Center of Contemporary Arts in Rome, the Guggenheim Museum for Taichung, Taiwan, and an extension of the Price Tower Arts Center in Bartlesville, U.S., is an architect who knows what art is. Her spectacular design for Singapore Art Museum (SAM)'s exhibition spaces indicates a new vision in architectural intervention.

Her sensuous and fluid futuristic structures regulating the flow of visitors is at the same time an art installation of a unique kind. While the esthetically malleable shapes of her structures interact with existing structures and spaces of the old SAM building, the spatial intervention also gives visitors a sensation of adventure and suspense, a feeling of intense elation while stepping into an unexpected fascination. Such energy spills over into the courtyard with elliptic structures springing up, or falling down, like alien bodies from a surreal world.

Helmut Kinzler, senior architect at Zaha Hadid's in London, explained at the launch in Singapore that the malleable structures were made of polyurethane, a non-organic material, and achieved through computer-aided manufacturing.

If Zaha Hadid's ""installations"" are the most eye-catching in the Deutsche Bank's All the Best art exhibition at the SAM museum, they also induce the visitor to come back and enjoy the collection of 150 photographs and drawings, selected specially for this exhibition and curated by The Deutsche Bank's Ariane Grigoteit and SAM's Joselina Cruz.

As Ariane Grigoteit pointed to the relevance of photography and drawing as basic forms of expression, Joselina Cruz linked the two disciplines in the perspective of contemporary trends in society, the urge for immediacy, the need to always be in the moment. ""Drawings are done on hotel stationary, napkins, torn magazine paper or notepaper, quickly rather than with deliberation. Photographs are done even faster,"" she states in her curatorial statement, while noting that the ""moment"" is something presently etched as a constant blur. ""One cannot find anything more still than constant movement,"" she says, ""we seize not only the day, but the now.""

Photographs such as Beat Streuli's New York 01 (2002) and Reinhard Mucha's charcoal sketch on paper titled Blind (1975) as well as Yan Pei-Ming's charcoal on paper Gardien (2002) allude to the capturing of the instant, but other examples reveal that such could also be illusionary. The Israeli artist Yehudi Sasportas in her beautiful Indian ink on paper painting titled Koudin (2006), for instance seems to hover between layers of memory, reality and a sense of the archeological, while Japanese artist Miwa Yanagi's stirring photograph titled Little Red Riding Hood is a recreation of the German fairy tale and Swiss artist Nic Hess's coal and pencil drawing on paper titled Ohr (Ear) reveals the imaginary within the realistic form. Meanwhile photographer Boris Mikhailov from the Ukraine's Untitled photograph #2 holds the moment, but unlike a snapshot, he had been waiting for a long time before the moment came to press the shutter on the camera.

The Deutsche Bank's Jubilee exhibition at SAM, the last in the trilogy exhibition after Berlin and Tokyo, appears to fit well with Singapore's motto Global City -- World of Opportunities. Coinciding with the first Singapore Contemporary Arts Biennale it shares the same vision of an exciting future for the arts.

All the Best
Exhibition of The Deutsche Bank Collection and Zaha Hadid
Until November 20, 2006
At Singapore Art Museum, 71 Bras Basah Road, Singapore
Tel. +65 63365361, http://www.singart.com

Copyright © 2008 The Jakarta Post - PT Bina Media Tenggara. All Rights Reserved.