Peace Centre, Singapore 4–20 January
In a city of identikit shopping centres, the Peace Centre mall, in the prime civic district in Singapore, is a charming dinosaur. Over the past 50 years it has housed an eclectic mix of tenants, from a bowling alley to seedy karaoke bars and printing shops. Sadly, the building has been sold and will soon be demolished to make way for more lucrative commercial developments. Over its last days (all tenants are to vacate by August), seven artists have come together to create an exhibition that is a modest but poignant celebration of what the mall represents: a pocket of untidiness and authenticity in a highly planned and controlled urban landscape.
Spread across dierent shop units, the exhibition comprises a mix of new commissions and older works. Among the older works are those by Song-ming Ang, exhibited at Renner Piano Co, an old musical instrument store. Ang’s two-channel video Backwards Bach (2013) shows the artist playing the Prelude in C Major from The Well-tempered Clavier (1722) forward and then backward on a harpsichord, creating new symmetries; while Recorder Sculptures (2019) features deconstructed recorders with their separated joints stacked onto one another to generate tense balancing acts or slumped around each other to evoke lazy repose. A sense of playful subversion of musical tradition and pedagogy is underlined when placed in a shop where generations of music students have gone to buy pianos and scores for formal lessons.
Meanwhile, many of the new works engage directly with the shop units and celebrate the stories and personalities of their owners. Daniela Monasterios Tan’s video installation The Salesgirl Who Became Boss (2023) is installed in Emms Boutique, a local fashion retailer operating since the 1970s. Tan models various dresses while striking poses inspired by the boutique’s own vintage ads (a woman answering a phone or holding a file), creating a montage of independent working women and their creative self-fashioning over the years, as well as harking back to a fashion scene less homogenised by globalisation.
Working against any easy nostalgia is the photographic series Through their Eyes [Peace
Centre] (2023) by Lim Zeharn and Lim Zeherng, centring on the people pictured in the many posters and advertisements placed throughout the mall. The project comprises two walls of tiled images. The first wall features cropped photos of the advertising models – for example, a man in an academic gown and square hat; a woman holding up a fanned-out stack of dollar bills. On another wall, we are shown the world through the ‘gaze’ of these characters – the artists had placed a camera at the vantage points of each of these models and snapped their corresponding perspectives. Capturing the mall’s interiors at odd angles (either too high or too low or facing weird nooks), these images render the surroundings strange and unknown, as if we are seeing the building through the eyes of an alien or ghost. From such a defamiliarised perspective, the busy comings and goings of people and the makings and remakings of buildings all seem to be part of a process of impersonal, endless change; in some sense, we are all in the Peace Centre, living on borrowed time.
Adeline Chia