While most of us are still admittedly in a holiday stupor, Singapore Art Week 2023 is nearly upon us. Check out our comprehensive guide to the visual arts festival’s key highlights here – and if that’s not enough, we’ve included some of the more underrated shows below.
Art is increasingly travelling to offbeat locations – take how a major show by non-profit arts organisation Oh! Open House will be staged at the over-50-year-old retail institution Tanglin Shopping Centre. Built in 1971, the mall has an interesting history with art, according to the organisation; it hosted no less than 16 art galleries and shops at one time in its five-decade-long history. The mall also played host to pop-up exhibitions showcasing works by local artists, as well as Nanyang artists giving painting lessons on the weekends.
Now, the mall is again acting as an arts nexus. It is the site for Oh! Open House’s ongoing debate series titled, For the House; Against the House, which uses art to frame arguments from various camps. This year, the show’s third iteration presents a double bill exploring two concepts: The Museum is Dead and Desire is Dead, which were conceptualised by Singaporean curators John Tung and Adele Tan respectively. Various artists will be presenting new works to argue their cases, as well as to pay homage to the mall, which will be demolished soon due to its en bloc status.
Jan 5 to Jan 15 at Tanglin Shopping Centre, 19 Tanglin Road
An artist-led festival, Islands Time-Based Art Festival (ITBA) made its debut at last year’s Singapore Art Week (SAW) and now returns for a sophomore edition. 19 emerging and established artists across various genres will be presenting live works that work towards the theme of “Just In Time”. There will be artworks spanning genres like performance art, sound, dance, theatre and more – all encouraging a sense of immediacy and visceral responses to and from the audience. If ever there was a work that encouraged you to be in the moment (and to put your phone down for the night), this festival might be it.
Jan 7 to Jan 15 at Blackbox and Rehearsal Studio, 42 Waterloo Street
Biennales are huge, sprawling events – but a new show is proposing a miniaturised version of sorts to the traditional biennale. Titled Sightseeing Sculpture: The Sky, The Land, and The Sea, and organised by Sculpture 2052 and Sculpture Society (Singapore), it is a site-specific installation featuring an impressive total of 163 boxes, each showcasing the miniature work of a local sculptor. It’s a great way to get an overview of Singapore’s sculpture scene, with both emerging names and established players being represented.
Jan 6 to April 2 at Sculpture 2052, 21 Woodlands Close, #03-16
Weeds may be the bane of avid gardeners but a new show by artist Robert Zhao proposes to give these seldom-loved plants a new look – quite literally. Titled Wild Flowers, the show seeks to spotlight the humble flowers, plants and weeds growing unnoticed in the obscure nooks and corners of Block 261 Waterloo Street, co-existing quietly alongside human architecture. In his show, Zhao depicts these tiny but hardy vegetative denizens (some as small as two centimetres in height) in a series of lightboxes, magnifying them many times over to allow viewers to appreciate the complexity of their design.
Jan 6 to Jan 15 at Level 3 Waterloo Centre, 261 Waterloo Street
This year’s edition of SAW notably features a debut collaboration between National Arts Council (the organisation behind Singapore Art Week) and People’s Association in order to further make the arts more accessible to all kinds of audiences. As part of this collaboration, you can expect to find artworks and experiences in heartland neighbourhoods, such as Kuti Kuti? by artists Quek Jia Qi and Aaron Lim.
As the name implies, Kuti Kuti? is a community art project that riffs off the traditional children’s game in which two opposing players take turns to deftly flip colourful plastic tokens on top of those of their opponent. In this project, the game is transformed into an interactive, life-sized soft sculpture playground through co-creation, re-emphasising the value of analogue play to connect all kinds of people in the digital age.
Jan 6 to Feb 6 at Radin Mas CC Foyer, 51 Telok Blangah Crescent