Culinary anthropologist Nithiya Laila is well-known for her advocacy of local ingredients, working with institutions to highlight their rich culinary possibilities and how using them reduces carbon footprint. Among foodies, she’s also known for organising cool pop-up dinners inspired by the histories of food, community and local farmers – though that’s been on hold for two years or so.

Now, Nithiya’s back in the midst of things with a new farmers’ market held at multi-label food hub The Refectory that’s geared around the theme of Singapore’s 30 x 30 sustainability goals (to build up our agri-food industry’s capability and capacity to produce 30 per cent of our nutritional needs locally and sustainably by 2030).

She has curated an impressive list of the best of the locally grown and made – a mix of local farmers as well as local craftsmen and artisanal producers. And even if you don’t cook, there are many local labels and designers represented at the market, such as Objects of Mass Distraction (lovely wearable art objects) and School of Clay Arts (pottery). Just remember to bring your own bag and pay by cash, if possible.

Whether we recognise it or not, design influences all of us in many ways in our day-to-day living. The latest exhibition at National Design Centre makes that its central premise.

Titled Design Superposition, it showcases works by 10 local and international creatives and artists, all of whom explore the schizophrenic nature of design through their own unique practices, in fields like illustration, architecture with fengshui principles, industrial design, science and technology, fashion, digital media, visual art, and nature.

For example, Floating Pixels (pictured) by Japanese artist and researcher Junichi Yamaoka aims to get people to reconsider the nature of pixels. Though our focus is almost always on the final product formed by pixels (the smallest unit in digital imaging), the work (which uses 3D-printed magnetic particles floating on the water’s surface to mimic the transformative nature of pixels on the screen) reminds us that our experience and inventions of the world are always designed through a series of simple phenomenon via information, and that pixels are also inevitably material through design.

“At its core, Design Superposition is about the production of design culture and industry, and a reflection of whether design is valuable or not,” says curator Yeo Ker Siang.

On now till April 10 at National Design Centre, 111 Middle Rd

Emerging curator Berny Tan was recently spotlighted in our Jan 2022 issue and the recent exhibition she curated for Singapore Art Week – Bad Imitations – was one of the event’s highlights. Now she’s onto her next showcase, titled Three Sketches for a Lost Year.

The show’s premise is based on the art of drawing and the show has been organised into a trio of mini-exhibitions (Mark, Curve, and Grid), each one based on a basic element in drawing practices. Each part will present five artists working in different mediums, both within and without the approaches traditionally defined as ‘drawing’. Think of the show as a loose proposition that aims to move beyond the understanding of drawing as a technique and present it as a sensibility instead – as the contemplation of lines in space, and the sketching-out of an image or idea.

And in a witty nod to the brevity normally associated with drawing, each of the three parts will last for only three days (Friday to Sunday), over three consecutive weekends. The show is held at the new independent space Field Studies, an artist studio and art space co-curated by artists Ang Song Nian and Robert Zhao Renhui.

Feb 25 to Feb 27 and March 5 to March 6 at #10-06A Lam Soon Industrial Building, 63 Hillview Ave