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Medium: Strip lights with running text
Dimensions: Variable

Speed seems to have taken over; we count the seconds between each minute, which will get us there quicker: cab, bus or MRT? We are efficient usually and when others are not, we can wait our turn watching TV screens where Mr. Bean reruns hopefully numbs us to the amount of time we are wasting. We have access to infinite websites around the world at mind-blowing speed, we are global, but first I wait for the lift, the salesgirl, the moment when ERP is not in use.

Medium: Installation with four coffee tables
Dimensions: 2.06M x 0.51M, 2.17 x 1.19M, 2.23 x 0.5M, 2.09 x 0.57M

RE-NEW

These are 4 projects of renovations to existing terrace houses for new owners. They reflect an ongoing trend of social mobility among certain groups in Singapore which is related to notions of individualism and practices of consumption. A highly mediatised link, this relationship between lifestyles and the living environment is one of continuous renewal and reinvention. In such a situation, ideas of the domicile and domestic and also renewed. The home as a place to nest, to leave traces of inhabitation, takes on a different context and meaning.

In our thinking and practices as architects with respect to this phenomenon, we looked for clues and devised design strategies from the actual processes of renewing these houses. Our interest was not in conceiving ideal models but rather to appropriate from the concrete possibilities offered by particular situations. This engagement with the potentiality of various notions of living and also with the many parties involved at different stages of the process were seen as creative and productive opportunities.

COFFEE TABLE PLANS

The bias towards the operations, the present-tational, as compared to re-presentational qualities of the different processes formed the method of working. An example would be seeing the drawn architectural plan not solely as a scaled representation of the house, but as a process of researching different possibilities from certain perspectives allowed when working on a plan. This recognition of the scene or context for working in is continued in the exhibition; the Coffee Table Plans project is an attempt to engage with the various aspects of displaying and reception of these 4 projects.

Again, immediacy and presentational qualities are sought. Different media, scales and the materiality of text, images, drawings and plywood table suggest different layers and processes. Linking all this fabrication is a process of correlation, specific to each project, connecting the text to the image to the presentational format and so on. Similarly, our interest in engaging with the viewer in the premise of the Marine Parade Community Library leads us to the idea of appropriating the new lifestyle section where coffee is served. Just as we discuss and make plans over coffee at the table, it may be appropriate to set up the architectural plans an stories on the coffee tables for this exhibition.

Medium: Mixed
Dimensions: Variable

In today's environment, we are coping with transition from an industrial world to a post-industrial, electronic world. Transition is a form of communication that communicates difference. It is a fight for relevance and perhaps even towards shaping an identity. Transitions involve human complexities and are often exemplified by the behaviours of mystics, schizophrenics and artists. An artist's quest for difference is in fact a quest for integration. Some say it is supposed to promote a political agenda, or to be critical and rebellious, or even to transcend the social and political context in which it was made. Arts, for me, is a right-brain activity. It aims to integrate the unconscious and conscious processes, sometimes saving people by providing an experience of beauty. Style is a means to attract and sometimes elicit memories (from new insights into reality to the hypocrisies of the social order). Aesthetics are incidental to underlying expression.

Medium: Soap
Dimentions: Variable

The act of cleansing one's hands is a daily ritual and through our daily rituals we negotiate our own history.

Medium: Mixed Media
Dimensions: Variable

The construction of Escapes - the emergency exist, the fire escape, secret tunnel behind the wall etc posed a most beguiling context for exploration of the theme of 'encounters' and 'imagined boundaries' within the ideological spaces where individuals in a community interact. Rather than working to construct a 'livable' space, this project is a surreptitious construct of/for paranoid, claustrophobic/agoraphobic and anomalous individuals whose existence is possible only close to or within these interstitial/heterotopic spaces where the probability for escape from so-called 'livable' spaces is pre-configured.


This collaborative project between myself (fiction & sound etc) Khiew Huey Chian (installation) and Adam Collins (sound design) seeks to compromise and complicate the idea of 'escape' in the circumstance of it being an essential feature in any blueprint for a building.


Initially, we intended to seek out an actual fire escape or emergency exit within the building and intervene in the purpose and function of this architectural feature. Another possibility we considered was the construction of an escape in another site where escape is not seen to be necessary - where it might even be considered an obstruction, a kind of 'paranoid construct' within an otherwise comfortable zone. A version of this concept has become the option taken as the former plan to work within an actual fire escape is understood to pose too many logistical and safety problems.


The work is an interdisciplinary intervention with the concepts behind the architecture of escape through poetry/fiction recorded into speech/sound and an actual construction-installation of an 'alternate route' on the main stairway leading down into The Necessary Stage's space. The construction will be made of white lycra stretched over a wooden structure. Eight speakers will be mounted along the length of the wall behind the lycra at ear-level. Through these speakers, the recorded performance text will be heard. Four different tracks will be played over the four CD players - Whispered, sung, voice-synthesized. The text lingers around ideas of descent, delay, desire-to-linger operating as friction to the simultaneous desire-to-escape - a 'delay system' of seduction and suggestion.


The white space within will be lit with pink fluorescent lights which will create a surreal, deceptively calming, anxiety-deferring evironment.


We hope the sensory experience within the constructed environment will raise questions on the notions of fear and paranoia, safety and reguse, exile and marginality - and of cours, 'escape' - Susie Lingham 

Medium: Video Installation
Dimensions: Variable

the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
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the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
the city's epidermis. style. representation. circulation of desire.
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The movement theatre group, A.S.A.P, headed by Sim Pern Yiau, returns with an intriguing performance of kinetic bodies which react to their environment. The group's previous works have been described as "moving sculptures which are suggestive of jazz improvisation sessions". Basic Entomology explores the notion of human hunger in its various manifestations.

A light hearted Italian monoperformance, reminiscent of street performance with music and songs about the story of the Cenci family during the Italian Renaissance: a history of politics, sex, blood and patricide. The performer uses the accordion as a "second actor" to complement the narrative. The performance also showcases the art of physical theatre and how it can be utilised in story-telling.

This site-specific performance scrapes the inside out of Henry James' gothic novel Turn of the Screw, replacing it with the underbelly of local ghost lore. Join STAGES' young cast on a rediscovery of death as custom, the dead as neighbours and fear as a way of life. The work is conceptualised by Jonathan Lim with members of STAGES.