SINGAPORE’S MUSIC MAKER

Previous presentations at the Venice Biennale’s Singapore Pavilion have dealt with themes related to the complexity of land and coastal geography, historical memory, and identity. This year, the pavilion will be home to works by Song-ming Ang that explore how we relate to music, on a personal and societal level.

A recipient of the National Arts Council’s Young Artist Award in 2011 and one of the artists selected for the President’s Young Talents 2015 exhibition at the Singapore Art Museum, Ang primarily focuses his practice on how music is produced, disseminated and consumed. This time, he is putting the spotlight on the recorder, an instrument Singaporean children learn to play as part of the national music curriculum.

Central to the presentation is a new three-channel film installation, Recorder Rewrite, which features children from diverse cultural and musical backgrounds performing a composition of their own, written after a workshop on improvisation exercises and unconventional uses of the recorder.

Rosa Daniel, CEO of the National Arts Council and co-chair of the Singapore Pavilion Commissioning Panel, says Ang’s proposal stood out as a “conceptual and reflective work that uses music as a subject to spotlight arts appreciation in Singapore”. She adds: “The appeal of his work is that it is cutting-edge yet nostalgic, international yet personal, offering audiences unusual insights into Singaporean life on a variety of levels, through the universal concepts of music and sound.”