At Art Stage Singapore, the art world is the city
Contempor a ry art, it must be said, is not only a function of time but of place, more specifically that of globalized society that shapes, directs and ultimately validates what we consider as art. This realm is evoked by a network of cities where most artists live and conduct their practice, tapping into its rich reserves of ideas, materials and capital. Unlike, say, literature freighted in the vernacular of the writer, the visual art of today aspires to some kind of universal language, traversing any points across the globe, with little loss of its value and immediacy.
It is because the art world, which dictates the conditions on how an inanimate object may be perceived and considered as art (Warhol’s Brillo boxes, for instance, would not have been considered as art in another time, devoid, as it were, of its particular art world), is the city, a nebulous, exciting and fraught concept that will be pondered, debated upon and re-imagined in the sixth edition of Art Stage Singapore (www.artstagesingapore.com) happening from Jan. 21 to 24 (vernissage on the 20th) next year at the Marina Bay Sands.
“We decided to take urbanity as a theme,” said Lorenzo Rudolf, founder and president of what is considered as Southeast Asia’s flagship art fair. “Based on that, we want to show a curated exhibition that will showcase the really important works by Southeast Asian artists handling this theme of urbanization in all its aspects and using this exhibition as a basis to launch certain debates. We want to bring it to a level where we want to discuss it with architects, planners, sociologists and politicians and to show the artists’ position as somebody like a seismograph of our society, someone who will raise questions and bring us to new and creative ways of thinking.”
Titled “Seismograph: Sensing the City — Art In the Urban Age,” this initiative is dubbed as the Southeast Asia Forum, which emphasizes the balance between “art, commerce and content.” Taking place alongside the decidedly market-driven aspect of the fair (which will feature 112 exhibitors, 75 percent of which are coming from Asia), it is an extension of the Southeast Asia Platform exhibitions in 2014 to 2015, which were curated undertakings that featured some of the most exciting artists of the region.
For 2016, the Forum is a structured as a thematic program that takes “a more focused and deeper view into broad global issues that also affect our immediate region and lives… and a broader approach towards contemporary art by situating it outside the community of the art world and connecting it to the larger society.” Its major component will be a series of talks bringing together architects, urbanists, social scientists, men and women of letters and artists to “examine, through their different perspectives, the challenges of urbanization and how cities can be re-imagined through different ways of seeing, learning and cooperation.” One of the talks will be headlined by the “starchitect” Rem Koolhaas.
Another major component will be the exhibition, which will survey the role of artists in the evolution of contemporary societ- ies across Southeast Asia. The 10 projects will focus on artists who relate to issues and sentiments of extremely rapid urbanization in their own countries. Among the featured artists will be Norberto Roldan from the Philippines, Aliansyah Caniago from Indonesia and Sherman Ong from Singapore.
In Roldan’s “100-Altars,” he pays tribute to a bygone era and pays homage to a rich history of simple and peaceful community life after the Second World War ended in the Philippines. Caniago, on the other hand, will present “Titik-Balik” (“Point- of- Return”), an ongoing art project started in 2012 in response to environmental damage caused by factory waste, to Situ Ciburuy lake in Bandung and resulting in the decline of the village’s fishing trade and tradition. Ong from Singapore will feature selected video works from his ongoing project “Nusantara,” which mingles fables of the Nusantara (an Indonesian word meaning “archipelago”) with contemporary dilemmas concerning migration and diaspora.
“This theme of urbanization is an omnipresent theme in Southeast Asia,” said Rudolf. “Every city has its particularity but that particularity is not just a local particularity. We can show to the world that what happens in Southeast Asia and its art is not neglecting the rest (that is out there); it’s related to the themes of our world. Our big themes are global themes. With that, we bring these regional artists to the global context. On the other side, we bring a global way of thinking into a regional or local context.”
‘We want to show the artists’ position as somebody like a seismograph of our society, someone who will raise questions and bring us to new and creative ways of thinking.’