Objectum: An Exhibition on the Shifting Meanings of Daily-Life Museum Objects by Wong Lee Min

Editorial Note: “Objectum is an exhibition resulting from curatingLAB: PHASE 03

Curating Lab 2102 offered recent graduates and young curators exposure into curatorial perspectives and practices. Organised by NUS Museum with support from the National Arts Council, the six-month programme began with a curatorial-intensive designed as a workshop, followed by internship assignments. Participants were guided by facilitators and mentors, working towards a final exhibition project. The programme centred on curatorial heterogeneities and contingencies, to be addressed as practices informed by conceptions of the nation and the global, spaces and their contexts, where modalities of practice are shaped and positions defined.”

 – (Programme collateral, Curating Lab: Phase 03:, NUS Museum, 2012).”

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Review of “LUCIFUGOUS” (X’HO + ARCN TEMPL) by Senile Dementia

“Wisdom that will bless I, who live in the spiral joy born at the utter end of a black prayer.”
Keiji Haino

3 distinct but related streams of dark energy converge to birth and unearth a Great Beast; X’ho’s “daily mantras’ founded as much on his forays into black metal, industrial/neo-folk and other dark esoterica/magick as from his sheer disdain for our Uniquely Singapore way of life, black ambient artist Ara Ophidia’s soundscapes/electronics, and ARCN TEMPL’s vision, empathy, instrumentation, arrangements and production.

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1. Introduction

after|thought is an art exhibition that examines how the ‘institution’ works to represent what has been constructed as a pivotal event in Singapore’s history – 9 August 1965, the date of Singapore’s separation from the Federation of Malaysia. Here the state museum, media and mass education are isolated as mediums through which we understand the issue of representation. Through the discussion of these three examples of the ‘institution’, after|thought ponders how information and memories of 9 August 1965 are consumed and negotiated by a contemporary generation.

 

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2. On Representation

The institutions we have chosen to discuss in after|thought have one consistent trait among them – they seek to represent. One may represent something by bringing it into presence, or by embodying it in a new way. In doing so, the institution is then also a site of power, since it holds agency in generating new configurations of information, which can be perceived and consumed as truth. Mediums such as textbooks, museums and media are all the more powerful due to their potential to reach large numbers of people and their ability to construct collective memories for the public.

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3. Art and Space

In conceiving the exhibition, we wanted to work with the dynamics that the space provided, instead of eliminating the narrative of the room by creating a ‘white cube’. Aptly, Goodman Arts Centre, where the exhibition was held, was an old school compound that housed Tun Seri Lanang Secondary School from 1962 to 1995, LASALLE College of the Arts from 1992 to 2007, followed by School of the Arts (SOTA) from 2007 to 2009, and the room we were given for the exhibition was typical for a Singaporean classroom. For younger Singaporeans – the five of us in the curating team included – encounters with 9 August 1965 were fed to us in history lessons in such classrooms, and the space itself had a narrative that could not be ignored. We thus decided to assign spaces for each artist to work with.

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4. after|thought at Oxford

We had the privilege of presenting the exhibition at the Southeast Asian Studies Symposium 2013, held from 9-10 March 2013 at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. This was also the Symposium’s first feature of contemporary art works.

after|thought: Oxford was a documentation of the art works featured at after|thought. We had anticipated the project to be a focal point for academics and scholars to gain insights into the contemporary issues of Singapore. In addition, the works could be a means to provoke critical discussions surrounding the representation of history in official narratives, as well as the use of art to complement the study of such issues.

after|thought: Oxford exhibition at Seminar Room 6, University of Oxford

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